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Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam
Vietcombank is one of Vietnam's biggest banks, taking deposits, making loans, and moving money for people and businesses.
Vietcombank is the bank that greases the wheels of Vietnam's trade with the outside world. It started life as a specialised bank for foreign exchange and international payments, and that heritage still shapes it today: it is the go-to bank for companies that import and export goods, helping them move money across borders, arrange trade finance, and settle payments in foreign currencies. Around this core, it runs a full commercial bank for ordinary people too — savings accounts, mortgages, personal loans, credit and debit cards, and mobile banking.
The money machine is what you'd expect from a bank, but the mix matters. It earns a spread by paying depositors one rate and lending out at a higher one, and it collects fees on cards, payments, trade finance, and foreign exchange — a fee base that's unusually strong for a Vietnamese bank because of that international trade DNA. It also runs a treasury operation that deals in currencies and bonds. Customers choose it largely for trust and convenience: it is one of the country's "big four" state-linked banks, with a huge branch network and a reputation for safety, which lets it pull in cheap deposits. That cheap funding is the real engine. Because depositors park money with Vietcombank at low rates, it can lend profitably while keeping some of the best asset quality in the sector — its bad-loan ratios have historically been among the lowest of any Vietnamese bank. The trade-off: as a big, state-influenced bank, it is expected to lend to important parts of the economy, and its fortunes rise and fall with Vietnam's growth and with the government's policy priorities.
The interesting modern twist is how it's been cleaning up its balance sheet and rewarding shareholders. In recent years it has been buying back and cancelling bad debts it inherited or accumulated, which frees up capital and improves the quality of its loan book. It is a major dividend payer, and the Vietnamese state — its largest shareholder — has a big say in how much cash comes back versus how much is retained to fund lending growth. Like all Vietnamese banks, it operates within tight regulatory limits on how much it can lend relative to its capital, so growing the loan book means raising or retaining capital rather than just dialling up risk. Strong, boring, and systemically important: that is Vietcombank.
Saved answer · last researched 14 Nov 2026