On January 29 (24th December in Lunar Calendar), commercial banks are preparing to take a Tet holiday, so it is more difficult to exchange new and good-as-new notes than in the previous days. Meanwhile, the demand for these notes is still quite large, creating positive conditions for outside services to push the exchange fees up.
Although in working hours, Mai Anh (residing in District 9, HCM City) is still hopelessly calling, texting her acquaintances working in banks to exchange new notes in order to prepare “lucky money” for her relatives. Hence, she is forced to seek for exchange services advertised on the Internet. Accordingly, when the keyword “change money, collect new notes” is typed on Google or social networks, immediately, hundreds or thousands of results are shown up within a few dozen seconds. All websites offer a detailed exchange fee table for customers to follow. However, customers can still bargain with the service providers to get a more reasonable fee.
Through the phone, Mai Anh met a man claiming to be Ngoc, specialising in exchanging new notes and all kinds of changes in HCM City. He said that he was willing to offer door-to-door exchange services with all denominations if the guests were in the city centre but the fee was quite high.
“I want to exchange five million dong to new notes with the face value of 20,000 dong, the service fee is 10 percent. Accordingly, I have to pay up to 5.5 million dong. For new notes with face value of 10,000 dong or less, the fee is up to a few dozen percent “, Mai Anh said. She shared that when she complained about the high fee, Ngoc agreed to reduce it to nine per cent.
As stated by the reporter of Nguoi Lao Dong Newspaper, the fee for changes is different but quite high, from four to ten per cent, with face value of 20,000 dong or more. Customers including individuals and enterprises can change for huge amount with door-to-door service. Small denominated banknotes such as 500 dong, 1,000 dong and 2,000 dong have exchange fees of up to 270 percent300 percent of total value but cannot be changed much and are not 100 percent new notes. People need these small denominations mainly to go to the temples during the Tet holiday.
Many commercial bank employees said that changing money for the Tet holiday this year was not as easy as previous years, especially for small denominations. Some people could not exchange to the 10,000 dong denominated notes so they had to change to other notes such as 20,000 dong and 50,000 dong.
According to the authorities of the State Bank of VietnamHCM City branch, the available new change volume in Tet holiday this year are less than previous years but there is no shortage and all cash needs of credit institutions are met. During the year, they fully met the structure of cash denominations, so there was no shortage and new notes were spent in the months of the year rather than being accrued at end of the year as before.
