Transaction limit for e-wallet is proposed at a maximum level of 20 million dong per day and 100 million dong per month for individuals; 100 million dong per day and 500 million dong per month for organisations.
At a recent seminar organised by VCCI, the chief economist of Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BIDV)- Can Van Lucsaid that the transaction limit through e-wallet should take into account the fact that per capita income and individual consumption were increasing. Since then, the set limit should be avoided to prevent electronic payment.
Meanwhile, from the perspective of Tran Quang HuyChair of the Financial Technology Club of the Association of Banks, e-wallet is essentially the property of users. Therefore, they need to be able to dispose of their assets.
Given that electronic payment is a bottleneck, there should be a mechanism to encourage and promote, according to Chair of E-commerce Association Nguyen Thanh Hung. For example, air ticket or tour booking is often paid online with much greater value than the proposed limit. Therefore, if the limit is kept at low level, it will affect the electronic payment.
In a report on cash digitisation in Asean announced by Standard Chartered Bank, Vietnam tops the region in terms of cash payment when buying goods online, with 90.17 percent.
Currently, e-wallet is one of the channels used for payment in e-commerce in Vietnam. The misconception that e-wallet is only used to pay small expenses does not seem to be agreed by experts. Most of the opinions said that e-wallet for large or small payment amounts, it should be decided by the users and the market.
Currently, Internet Banking and Mobile Banking users at banks can fully install different limits from a few tens of million dong to several hundred million dong per transaction or in one day and there is no limit applied by month.
An existing user can also open more than one account at a bank. From this fact, the President of E-commerce Association Nguyen Thanh Hung expressed concern about the proposal to limit each user to open only one e-wallet at a supplier. According to Hung, users may need different accounts to connect e-wallet to serve different consumer and transaction needs.
In the report on cash digitisation in Asean, it is also shown that Vietnam currently has only 30.8 percent of the population having bank accounts. Encouraging and promoting cashless society is being implemented from policies to business orientation of organisations and businesses.
However, up to now, among more than 20 million e-wallets registered at 20 e-wallet operators, only 4.2 million accounts have been linked to bank accounts. This is a very low rate even though e-wallet operators have launched many stimulus programmes to link e-wallets to bank accounts.
In fact, in order to promote cashless payment, the focus needs to change from awareness to behaviour of end-users rather than organisations. Loosening the limit of e-wallet trading can help motivate users to link their e-wallets with the bank accounts, thereby contributing to promoting cashless payments.
