Statistics of the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) show that the number of cards issued as of the end of Q4/207 amounted to 132 million units, up more than 19 percent from the beginning of the year. With about 70 million people aged more than 15 now, on average, each person owns about two bank cards. The number of cards issued is increasingly high, and services are also increasingly diversified and more, customers have many choices but are also extremely puzzled amidst thousands of fees.
The reality shows that people, especially urban residents, may own as many as 4-5 cards. Owning many cards but not knowing service fee, while not using, monitoring the balance frequently, customers are “panic” upon finding that their money had lost as they make balance inquiry. When asking bank staff, customers are puzzled again among a forest of fees that are impossible to remember.
Currently, a customer who opens a bank account will usually be advised to use other utility services such as SMS Banking, Internet Banking or Mobile Banking. Each of this service has a series of fees such as registration fee, maintenance fee, internal/external money transfer fee, service termination fee, token key fee, etc. As such, each cardholder may suffer 25-30 different kinds of fees.
The card service fee for individual customers at banks is also diversified. Currently, the basic fees for this service have maintenance fee, withdrawal fee from ATM machine, money transfer fee from ATM, Pin reissuance fee, reissuance fee, inquiry fee, etc. For maintenance fees, some banks exempt while some others collected as much as 50,000-100,000 dong per card. For Visa or Master cards, issuance fee may amount to 200,000 dong per card.
For SMS Banking, a service that has recently attracted a lot of concerns and is assessed to be very necessary and important, the fee is quite high. The SMS Banking fee includes service registration fee, monthly maintenance fee, service termination fee, money transfer fee, debt reminding fee, etc.
Mostly at banks, customers will not have to pay fees when registering to use. However, to maintain service, the monthly payment is normally 8,800-11,000 dong, or even 16,500 dong. For the entire year, card owners will have to spend 100,000 200,000 dong to maintain service. In addition, to cancel the service and not receiving account fluctuation message, customers may lose another 10,000 dong to terminate following regulations in some banks.
SMS Banking fee is nothing compared to internet banking fee. The service is really convenient but the fees may amount to hundreds of thousands of dong per month for basic needs. To compete, many banks have exempted maintenance service fees such as BIDV, Vietcombank, VIB, etc. while mainly listing this fee at 100,000 dong 130,000 dong per year.
The fees incurred a lot in current internet banking are money transfer transactions. While some banks such as ACB, TPBank, Techcombank, etc. exempt the entire fees for internal account transfer transactions, the remaining banks such as Vietcombank, BIDV, MB collected 1,100-1,900 dong per transaction.
The external money transfer is even more expensive. Except for Techcombank that is exempting this fee, most of them collect quite high fees, varying according to the amount of transaction. For small amounts of money from two million dong to 20 million dong, the account transfer fee ranges between 6,600-11,000 dong per transaction. For large amounts of money such as 200 million dong, the fees payable may amount to 44,000 dong (VIB, Vietcombank, etc.).
As such, an account with no transaction within one month will be collected 25,000-25,000 dong maintenance fee per month. For an account that has demand for using basic services such as balance inquiry, money withdrawal of 2-3 times per month, internet banking money transfer 2-3 times per month (for small amount of money), the fees paid to banks may amount to 50,000-70,000 dong per month and the fee for the entire year may rise to 600,000 dong to 840,000 dong.
That is for cardholders who wish to use for their daily spending needs, while for businesspeople, especially those who involve in online business, the amount of transaction will be many times higher.
Some banks, after many years exempting fees to attract and create the habit of using service for customers, have recently started to collect fees or raised some kinds of fees. Banks often attribute the reason to investment in technology, improvement of utilities for services but it seems that the answer is not really satisfactory to customers. Too high fees compared to low income of the people have partly prevented the people’s habit of using cash in payment.
