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ANZ wins license to open fully owned bank
Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) Banking Group has won a license to open a fully owned bank in Vietnam, becoming the third foreign wholly owned bank to operate in the country after HSBC and Standard Chartered.
ANZ Bank Vietnam Ltd. will be capitalized at VND1 trillion (US$60.5 million), with its headquarters in Hanoi, the State Bank of Vietnam said in a statement on its website Friday.
It will be allowed to operate in Vietnam for 99 years, the statement said.
The license for ANZ, which already has branches in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City and a nationwide automatic teller machine network, is the third issued in a month after similar permits for HSBC and Standard Chartered Plc.
The new entity of ANZ, which owns 10 percent in Sacombank, one of Vietnam’s two listed banks, would expand banking activities to tap a large market in the country of 86.5 million people, only 10 percent of whom have bank accounts.
ANZ, which has been in Vietnam for 14 years and is one of nearly 40 foreign banks in the country, would compete with HSBC and Standard Chartered and also four state-run banks, including the country’s top lender Agribank.
Vietnam also has 37 partly private banks, more than half of them small with total assets of less than $1 billion each.
It pledged to gradually open its banking sector when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2007, but foreign banks have often complained it was doing so too slowly.
The country’s bank loans in the first nine months of this year rose 18.03 percent from the same period in 2007, slowing from an annual growth of 30 percent in the same period in 2007, the central bank said on Friday.
It aims to curb banks’ credit growth at 30 percent for the whole of 2008 to fight double-digit inflation, after lending surged 54 percent last year.
Thanhnien
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