Based on database of the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV), statistics of BizLIVE showed that there was a strong fluctuation in the amount of checkable deposits of individual customers.
Individuals’ payment accounts here are active demand deposits of individual customers opened at banks to use payment services provided by banks (such as card services, payment services by non-cash payment instruments).
Specifically, in the first quarter (Q1) 2020, although the number of this type of account continued to increase following the trend over the years, the balance on the accounts sharply fell compared to the previous quarter (Q4 2019).
This is the first decline after a series of five consecutive quarters of increase. With higher number of accounts opened in the period, the average balance also dropped significantly.
According to statistics, in Q1 2020, the total amount of deposits on personal payment accounts fell by up to 23.198 trillion dong compared to the previous quarter, a record decline in recent years when comparing the quarters. The latest quarter with reduction was Q3 2018, but the value of decline was only 5.342 trillion dong.
In Q1 2020, the entire banking system had up to 90.84 million checkable accounts of individual customers, continuing the uptrend over the years, with total outstanding balance of 476.523 trillion dong, while there were 88.5 million accounts with an outstanding balance of 499.721 trillion dong in the previous quarter.
Accordingly, the average outstanding balance on each individual account was only 5.245 million dong per account. Previously, this average outstanding balance steadily increased from 2018 to the end of 2019 from 4.761 million dong to 5.656 million dong per account.
In recent years, with the booming trend of non-cash payment transactions, the number of new personal payment accounts newly opened in Vietnam has continuously increased and the size of the deposits has also constantly gone up. The reduction of up to 23.198 trillion dong in Q1 2020 is a notable phenomenon in terms of size.
It may be a short-term volatility, but it is large in size and needs time to be monitored for certain reasons. Q1 2020 is the first quarter the economy was negatively affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. In another development, this phenomenon may more or less involve the idle capital of people the number of newly opened accounts of individual investors joining the stock market which also unexpectedly created a record high in March 2020.
