Vietnam's Techcombank pursues retail push after major IPO

By Reuters   June 2, 2018 | 06:50 pm PT
Vietnam's Techcombank pursues retail push after major IPO
A woman walking by a Techcombank office in Hanoi. Photo by AFP
The bank is seeing strong growth in services such as credit cards, auto loans and bancassurance.

Vietnam’s Techcombank, fresh after raising $922 million from global investors, aims to expand aggressively into retail banking to capitalize on booming demand for an array of financial services, its senior executives said on Friday.

“On the lending side, we are having an increasing orientation toward retail, a disproportionate amount of which would be mortgages,” Chief Financial Officer Trinh Bang told Reuters in an interview.

The 25-year-old bank, formally Vietnam Technological & Commercial Joint Stock Bank, is seeing strong growth in services such as credit cards, auto loans and bancassurance, Trinh said.

The comments come after the Hanoi-based lender priced its April initial public offering (IPO) at the top of a marketing range, valuing it at $6.5 billion and making it Vietnam’s second-biggest listed bank after state-controlled Vietcombank.

As the issue was not sold to retail investors, bankers refer to it as an Initial Equity Offering instead of an Initial Public Offering.

Cornerstone investors included Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC Pte Ltd [GIC.UL], Fidelity Management & Research and domestic fund Dragon Capital. Together, they bought 76 percent of shares offered in the IPO - one of the largest amounts among Vietnam IPO cornerstones.

Techcombank’s appeal stems from a boom in financial services while the economy expands at record rates.

Vietnam reported annual credit expansion of about 18 percent for the past two years, with banks posting strong profit growth. A manufacturing boom spurred the export-dependent economy to grow 7.4 percent in January-March - the fastest first-quarter pace in a decade - after growing 6.8 percent in all of 2017.

 
 
go to top