Trang Chủ
Ngoan said that customers should be cautious about withdrawing their savings before the due date to go to another bank just because of a gift incentive because they would probably lose their interest.
He added that customers need to weigh opportunity costs because the value of a gift may not offset the amount of interest money lost. Changing safe-deposit boxes continuously is also not safe.
One week after Viet Nam Bank for Technology and Commerce (Techcombank) launched its Loc Xuan Depository Certificate programme, the Bank for Investment and Development of Viet Nam (BIDV) also advertised a sales promotion programme worth VND8 billion (US$500,300).
On the occasion of International Women and to celebrate its one year anniversary, the South East Asian Bank gave discounts to new customers who deposited their savings or existing who re-deposit their savings from March 8 to April 30, with the value of gifts depending on the amount of money deposited. Three months after a Du Xuan programme promotion, the Military Bank (MB) raised VND800 billion ($50 million), or VND450 billion ($28 million) beyond expectations. Normally MB could mobilise as much as VND100 billion ($6.3 million) per month. With the Loc Xuan programme, Techcombank raised a total capital of VND200 billion ($12.6 million) 15 days before schedule.
It is also necessary for banks to consider mobilising capital from savings through promotion programmes because they must relend their raised money for profits, Ngoan said.
Tran Ngoc Minh, Director of the HCM City-based branch of State Bank of Viet Nam (SBV), said the fact that commercial banks offer discounts or gifts to draw customers is normal, but discounts were also deemed a form of increasing interest rates. Banks should only raise "hot" capital in urgent cases, he added.
SBV Deputy Governor Nguyen Dong Tien shared Minh opinion by raising his concerns over the redundancy of usable capital in financial institutions and the upward trend of interest rates, which are likely to unbalance capital supply and demand in the market.
Tien remarked that after an interest rate race occurred at the end of 2003, the country banking system has a superfluous short-term capital of VND10 trillion ($625 million) and tens of trillions of dong in bonds not yet converted to cash.
In the first half of the year, SBV maintained its key interest rate at 8.25 per cent. However, mobilising and lending interest rates for deposits and loans in dong offered by commercial banks are often 0.12 - 0.24 percentage points higher than the SBV key rate. Experts attributed the tendency of increasing interest rates to inflation, the economy demand for capital and pressure from increasing interest rates on the dollar.
For their part, commercial banks admitted that they had not yet intended to raise interest rates, but to avoid losing customers, they had to change their policies.
Source: Vietnam News, June 28
