The VND interest rate race has become hotter with new record for deposit interest rates having been set by the HCM City Housing Development Joint Stock Commercial Bank (HDBank) at 9.8 per cent per annum for 36-month term.
Strong recovery of local stock market and wild fluctuations in gold prices, causing less money flowing to banks, have pressured local commercial lenders to raise more capital by continuously increasing deposit interest rates in recently days.
On June 1, SeABank and VIB Bank both began applying new interest rates with sharp increases in the rates of some terms of deposits, or issuing deposit certificates at high interest rates.
SeAbank’s interest rates have increased from 7.2 per cent per annum to 7.44 per cent for one-month term deposits, from 7.8 per cent to 8.04 per cent for three-month term, from 8.1 per cent to 8.34 per cent for six-month and from 8.4 per cent to 8.64 per cent for nine-month term deposits.
VIB Bank has issued deposit certificates from June 1 to July 16, 2009 with the interest rate of 9.55 per cent at the highest. It is applying the bonus interest rate of 0.3 per cent and 0.45 per cent for 24- and 36-month term deposits, which prove to be far higher than those offered by the deposit certificates of other banks.
These two banks just raised their deposit interest rates half a month ago.
Analysts have said deposit interest rates have become overly high as the ceiling lending interest rate is 10.5 per cent.
The interest rates also are tending to increase in the interbank market, according to the State Bank of Vietnam. The rate for 12-month term loans has soared from 1.16 per cent to 8.9 per cent.
The situation is contrary to the U.S. dollar interest rates which have witnessed sharp falls after four state-owned commercial banks agreed to cut down by 0.5 per cent to the maximum level of 1.5 per cent per annum from June 1.
The move followed by Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB), DongA Bank, Military Bank (MB) with decreases of around 0.1 per cent-0.8 per cent per annum upon each term. (VietnamNet, Young People)
Vietnamese
