Bank cards are not popular in Vietnam

Visa’s chief representative and manager for Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos said its recent survey showed that very few domestic residents knew about card payment services.
The survey was made among more than 1,000 residents in the northern Hanoi capital and the southern Ho Chi Minh City.

The current penetration of banking is very low in the country – only 6% or so of the population had a bank account.Card payment services are unpopular in Vietnam as few residents have bank accounts and information on their convenience has yet to reach the masses, read a Visa International market survey.

As many 58% of interviewed residents answered they were not rich so they did not open a bank account. People generally only moved on to holding a payment card after they have a saving or current account. The small number of bank accounts promised huge opportunity to expand both banking and card payment services in Vietnam, according to Visa.

In fact Visa International has obtained strong growth in the country over the past few years.
The number of Visa cardholders in Vietnam was growing at an annual rate of 70% and Visa had attracted some 200,000 debit and credit cardholders by late last year.
Visa had seen successful launches with its partner banks like Eximbank, ACB, Sacombank, ANZ and Techcombank particularly Visa Debit.

This payment product gives the cardholders all the benefits of Visa, while allowing them to effectively manage their payments directly from their accounts without incurring debt.
With a large population with rising incomes, the opportunities that Vietnam presented to Visa were huge.

This year Visa plans to increase its coordination with 17 partners in Vietnam and the relevant offices to develop the products and services that would fit the Vietnamese market and that drive the shift from cash to payment cards. It targets to educate the market about the benefits of payment cards in terms of convenience, security, ease of use, travel and domestic shopping among others. Visa’s key segments will be supermarkets, hotels, restaurants and filling stations.

Source: Thanh Nien