With a positive macroeconomic background at the moment, interest rates will basically stay steady until the end of the year due to excessive liquidity and proper credit growth, according to an official from the State Bank of Vietnam.

M&A in banking sector is forecast to be exciting in the near future as many banks are accelerating to restructure and raise capital to meet Basel II standards’ deadline by 2020 set by the central bank, experts said.

It's clear that digitalization is a prerequisite for local banks to survive and develop in the new era.

Vietnam is experiencing a boom in mobile payments as more and more e-wallet providers have aggressively joined the market.

Growing bad debts reaching hundreds of millions of US dollars keep pressuring BIDV, Vietcombank, and VietinBank.

Some banks have recovered trillions of Vietnamese dong in bad debt by selling off assets secured with non-performing loans in the first half of 2019.

A number of commercial banks in Vietnam have successfully recovered trillions of Vietnamese dong in bad debt by selling off collateral in the first half of 2019, according to the Nguoi Lao Dong Online website.

Vietnam’s banking system is becoming more susceptible to shocks as household leverage continues to increase, but near-term risk appears limited amid the benign operating environment and strong economic growth.

Many banks have bought back the bad debts that they had sold before to the Vietnam Asset Management Company (VAMC), taking a new step forward in bad debt settlement.

Nguyen Quoc Toan, chairman of Nam A Commercial Joint Stock Bank and son of the bank’s late, female founder Tran Thi Huong alias Tu Huong, plans to relinquish his post to help solve his family’s asset disputes.

A bunch of Vietnamese banks are in the race to meet the requirements on capital adequacy ratio (CAR) following Basel II standards right in 2019, one year earlier than the deadline for implementation on January 1, 2020.

Cross-ownership in the country’s banking system had almost been eliminated, a recent report by the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) showed.

Replacing magnetic strip cards with chip cards is expected to resolve the long-going security issues affecting bank cards, resulting in loss of money and personal data leaks in banks.

A majority of credit institutions in the country said their business performance in the first quarter of 2019 was better than the same period last year, according to the State Bank of Viet Nam's March survey released late last week.