ACB to hike chartered capital to 5.8tr dong
Source: 25-JUL-2008 Intellasia | 23/Jul/2008 ATPVietnam
Jul 25, 2008 - 7:00:00 AM The State Bank of Vietnam (SBV)'s HCM City branch recently gave permission to the Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank (ACB) to scale up its chartered capital from the current of 2.63 trillion dong to 5.805 trillion dong, marking the second biggest bank on chartered capital among commercial joint stock banks in Vietnam, trailing only the Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam (Vietcombank).

With a flexible interest rate policy together with launching consecutive new products, especially its E-banking services and serving quality, ACB always maintains being the Vietnam's leading commercial joint stock bank for many years.

Although during the first half of the year, the bank has to meet many hardships due to impacts from the bearish changes of the economy, ACB's total deposits reached 90.345 trillion dong, up 33% from the start of this year, nearly 41.9 trillion dong in total outstanding loans, rising 30% and against the end of last year and over one trillion dong in profit, 13.6% increase from a year ago.

The policy of "safe lending" not only brings good business effect to ACB, but also increase the trust of customers when the bank's overdue debt ratio was at 0.4%, bad debt rate of less than 0.1% and capital safety rate at 14%, a 8% excess in comparison with SBV's regulations.

Recently, ACB has been presented with the "Best Bank in Vietnam 2008" award by Euromoney, the world's leading financial magazine, marking the third time the lender has received such a prestigious award with the first in 1997 and the second in 2006.

In addition, ACB also obtained the pole place amongst top ten "most satisfactory banks" in Vietnam chosen by the group of banking and financial specialists of Saigon Tiep Thi newspaper after selecting feedbacks from consumers on 30 commercial joint stock banks and most satisfactory financial services during 2007 and the first quarter of 2008.

Thanks to these achievements, the UK-based Standard Chartered Bank recently decided to enlarge its holding rate into the local bank from 8.84% to 15%.

In recent time, ACB put into operation two transaction offices in HCM City and Gia Lai central highland province, bringing the bank's network to 146 transaction sites and branches nationwide.