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Banks rushing to issue credit cards
Commercial banks are rushing to issue cards to individual clients, considering this the effective tool to approach clients.
Besides ATM cards, commercial banks are now trying to develop payment credit cards. This kind of card is considered the most user-friendly wallet with which people can make payment whenever they want, even when they travel abroad.
The Asia Commercial Bank (ACB) has issued Visa Platinum card with EMV standards. This is a card with an electronic chip - a microprocessor like a multi-functional miniature computer capable of storing encoded information with high security level.
Being considered as the bank with the biggest number of issued international credit cards and with many different card services, Vietcombank said it would continue to focus on card issuance.
Not only domestic banks are rushing to issue credit cards, foreign banks have also been paying a special attention to developing credit card services. Citibank Vietnam has recently announced a new product – Citibank PremierMiles. This is the first travel card in Vietnam which has been designed based on the cooperation between Citibank and big airlines in the world, aiming to bring best services to clients in Vietnam.
Citibank is the world’s leading card issuer with 16 million of card accounts. Meanwhile, according to Surath Chatterjee, a senior executive of the bank, Vietnam is the eighth market in Asia where Citibank issues PremierMiles. He stressed that Vietnam was one of the priority markets for Citibank and the banking group would focus on developing new products.
Representative from ACB said that the competition in the international bank card market? has become stiffer. Meanwhile, banks seem to slow down the development of ATM cards. Currently, ATM cards are used mostly to withdraw cash from ATMs. However, the main purpose of card issuance is to encourage non-cash payment, not simply withdraw cash from ATMs.
“It would be insignificant for banks to inject big sums of money in ATMs, so that people can withdraw cash,” he said.
The representative went on to say that if ATM card holders only use ATMs as cash providers, banks will continue incurring loss, because banks have to make heavy investment to develop the ATM network.
Though Vietcombank has been “dethroned” from its top position as the number one cards issuer after many years, , the bank’s leaders don’t regard this as bad news. “Our period of “rapid development in ATM cards is over. Now we want to promote card transactions and to consider the efficiency of the cards,” a senior executive explained.
Meanwhile, a senior executive of a bank said on a local newspaper: “This is a type of business that brings heavy losses. People only use cards to withdraw money, not to make payments. Meanwhile, banks are not allowed to collect fees from cash withdrawal transactions”.
Statistics show that by the end of 2010, the number different kinds of cards of issued had reached 28.5 million, including 400,000 international credit cards
Nguyen Tu Anh, General Director of SmartLink, noted that banks now not only try to push up the issuance of cards, but also try to develop new services and offer new added value to card products.
vietnamnet
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