At the 2019 Annual general Meeting (AGM) last week, Chair of Commercial Joint Stock Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam (Vietcombank) Nghiem Xuan Thanh said that the bank officially plans to open a branch in Australia this year.
“This plan will be implemented, if approved by competent agencies,” Thanh told shareholders.
With this plan, it is expected that Australia will be a new destination that Vietnamese banks start to approach.
Previously, Vietcombank launched a 100 percent subsidiary bank in Laos in 2018. After being approved by the US Federal Reserve (Fed), it is expected that in July 2019, Vietcombank will become the first commercial bank in Vietnam to set up representative office in the US.
At its 2019 AGM, Saigon Hanoi Commercial Joint Stock Bank (SHB) submitted shareholders the plan to set up a 100 percent subsidiary bank or contribute capital in a credit institution (CI) in Ivory Coast, with the aim to expand its presence in the African market.
SHB’s leader said that the number of Vietnamese businesses investing in Ivory Coast has continuously been increasing recently, mainly focusing on projects of building processing factories to serve export and import activities of the two countries. Therefore, the demand for capital and international payment activities have also increased quickly, while there is no presence of Vietnamese CIs in this area, and SHB wants to catch the trend.
SHB is also a Vietnamese commercial bank that soon has 100 percent subsidiary banks in Laos and Cambodia. These are also the two main markets in the trend of investing overseas of many other banks over the years, such as Commercial Joint Stock Bank for Industry and Trade of Vietnam (VietinBank), Commercial Joint Stock Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BIDV), Saigon Thuong Tin Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Sacombank) and Military Commercial Joint Stock Bank (MB).
If these new plans mentioned in the above are approved by competent authorities and implemented, the market scope of Vietnamese commercial banks will begin to be expanded, instead of mainly concentrating in the Indochina area over the years.
