The annual Asian Banker (TAB) just continued to honor the 500 most significant and most powerful banks in the world. Some familiar names of large credit institutions in Vietnam continued to be present.
In the list of the 500 largest and most powerful banks in the world announced by The Asian Banker, Vietnam participated with 19 organisations, including Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam (Vietcombank), Military Commercial Joint Stock Bank (MB), Vietnam Technological and Commercial Joint-Stock Bank (Techcombank), HCM City Development Joint Stock Commercial Bank (HDBank), Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BIDV), Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank (ACB), Vietnam Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Industry and Trade (Vietinbank), and so on.
The presence of Vietcombank (VCB) convinced the leading position of the Vietnamese banking system on some basic indicators. VCB currently had a system scale and financial strength, brand influence. The bank had also been leading the profit with a gain of over 10 trillion dong both the previous and current years.
Techcombank was a star in the private banking sector with profits continuing to grow positively in 2019.
TAB highly appreciated HDBank for its growth potential with the criteria of scale growth, asset balance sheet quality, risk management, operational quality and liquidity.
Some of the credit institutions present in the list of the 10 most significant and most potent Vietnamese banks in the region also show different capacities. The come-back of one of the strong private banks, after the crisis, was a highlight of ACB. Meanwhile, Tien Phong Commercial Joint Stock Bank (TPBank), after restructuring, witnessed breakthroughs in technology and service investment.
Three banks with State capital, despite different nuances, can not deny the role, influence, credit market share and scale across the system. Accordingly, Vietinbank, BIDV and Vietnam Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Agribank) were also highly appreciated by TAB in the rankings, although Vietinbank was facing specific difficulties in capital raising efforts towards Basel II; Agribank was still a non-public bank; BIDV, after all attempts, just solved the problem of negotiating with a recent international strategic partner.
The positive point among Vietnamese banks, honored to be the largest and most powerful of the 500 leading financial institutions and institutions in the world, was that some of which had achieved Basel II standards soon before the prescribed schedule of the State Bank of Vietnam.
These were Vietcombank, Techcombank, HDBank, MB, ACB which confirmed the ability of these banks to approach and apply operational management standards and risks according to international standards. These organisations themselves also showed functional financial capacity with indicators affirming positive business performance.
Highlights of growth were found at HDBank, which was impressed by the market because of significant innovation. In 10 years, HDBank recorded an increase of 22 times in scale, assets, outstanding loans, effective risk management with the best asset quality in the industry. The bank’s Return on Total Assets (ROA) and Return on Common Equity (ROE) reflected the high profitability ratios. Noticeably, HDBank’s individual non-performing loans ratio for many years was only one percent.
In a market where differentiation and unique strategies were essential to bring organisations ahead, HDBank was a long-term vision organisation with exclusive advantages of unique customer ecosystem and capacity of private mergers and acquisitions (M&A). That was proved by the success of two international M&A deals in Vietnam financial market, which were acquiring 100 percent capital of Societe generale Viet Finance of France (SGVF France) and merged DaiABank into HDBank.
HDBank had gone through two phases of restructuring of the credit institutions system, with M&A capabilities including post-M&A handling with practical efficiency. Unlike several financial institutions, it seemed that every time HDBank participated in M&A programmes, it marked a new record of development and scale.
The ceremony honoring the 500 global largest and most powerful banks with the presence of banks, major financial institutions of the region and the world, and the rankings were published in the framework of the annual meeting on Sibos national payment in London in late September 2019 of The Asian Banker Magazine, establishing the success of leading banks in Vietnam. These were large and robust credit institutions that verified their competitiveness and integration into financial markets in the region and the world.
