Four local financial institutions - Krungthai Card, Bank of Ayudhya, Kasikornbank and Siam Commercial Bank - feature in the Top 50 Asia-Pacific issuers by credit-card outstandings, according to Lafferty's Global Credit Card Rankings.
Of the top-10 global issuers, two are UK-based - HSBC Group and Barclays Group - and the other eight are US-based.
Last year, the Asia-Pacific overtook North America in credit cards issue, but there is still a sizeable market for retailer cards in North America. When such cards, estimated at more than 600 million, are taken into consideration, North America is still by far the largest global market for credit cards.
In the past few years, growth in credit cards and debit cards in the region has mainly been driven by China.
From 2003-2009, the number of credit cards in China grew on average by 44 per cent per year. In the same period, the value of credit-card transactions increased by 73 per cent.
The research also shows that the four largest US issuers - JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Capital One - account for almost half of North America's credit-card outstandings and the total of these four organisations' outstandings is significantly larger than the combined figures of the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Middle East and Africa.
The Lafferty report provides a comprehensive map of the global credit-card market.
It tracks the world's largest credit-card issuers in terms of the number of cards in issue and credit-card outstandings in 65 of the most significant credit-card markets in the world.
A number of country-level card usage indicators are also provided - such as per adult penetration, average number of monthly transactions per card and average annual billed volume per card.
