Standard Chartered has Vietnam aspirations

Standard Chartered Vietnam CEO Nirukt Sapru is proud of the bank’s Vietnam operations that stretch back to 1904

Standard Chartered opened its first branch in Saigon in 1904. What important milestones has the bank passed in its development?

The early years of the 20th century saw the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China provide support to a number of trading companies to help them take advantage of opportunities as economies in the Greater Mekong opened up. In 1969 Chartered Bank merged with Standard Bank, creating an incorporated bank in London under the name Standard Chartered. In 1990 we were one of the first international banks to re-establish ourselves through a representative office in Ho Chi Minh City.

Following the official approval from the State Bank of Vietnam, effective from August 2009, Standard Chartered commenced operations in our locally incorporated entity – Standard Chartered Bank (Vietnam) Limited. The incorporated enterprise now has three branches and employs over 850 staff in the country, providing a full suite of commercial and retail banking products and services for corporates, financial institutions, small and medium enterprises and individuals.

What are key points in your strategy to serve as a leading international bank in Vietnam?

We are fully committed to participating and investing in the growth of Vietnam. We have done so here for almost a century. Our unwavering drive to do so is best summed up by our brand promise – Here for good. It is a commitment that we stand by as we embark on the next phase of our journey together with Vietnam. This aspiration will require a steep change in the growth rate of the businesses. We are confident that if we follow our business strategies we can achieve the targets.

Here for good means we are here for people, here for progress and here for the long run. In retail banking, we now offer various attractive products like high interest rates for online current accounts with no lock-in periods and no minimum balance requirements, applying for personal loans online to get 1 per cent interest rate deduction. For corporate and institutional clients, we are advancing our relations with global corporates and expanding our local corporate client base. For our employees, we are making it a great place to work by expanding our office in Ho Chi Minh City, applying agile working space, and organising staff parties.

Regarding regulators, we are sustaining good rapport and partnership with the government and the State Bank of Vietnam. Since being appointed as the sole Sovereign Credit Ratings Advisor to the Vietnamese government in 2012, the bank has been working actively with relevant agencies to help improve the government’s engagement with the rating agencies. As the ratings advisor, we have helped Vietnam steer through a period of macroeconomic instability, resulting in the country’s return to a positive outlook as Moody upgraded Vietnam’s credit ratings from B2 to B1 with a stable outlook late this July. We remain committed to assisting Vietnamese authorities in creating a banking system that can fully support the abundant development opportunities.

The aspiration has also many things to do with our CSR. We are giving back to the communities with activities focusing on four main pillars, Seeing is Believing, Living with HIV, the Environment, and Diversity and Inclusion. Bank staff are allowed to have three days off every year for volunteering activities in CSR.

In Vietnam, Seeing is Believing has restored eyesight and prevented blindness for 40,000 people, provided eye care services to 911,000 people, presented about 14,400 glasses to the short-sighted and trained millions of people about primary eye care since 2004. For the next phase in Vietnam during 2013-2016, Standard Chartered Vietnam is co-operating with Standard Chartered Korea on a project in which the latter has sponsored $1 million for Vietnam to extend the campaign to more rural and remote areas. Late this October, we will be organising our Ride for Sight challenge with a hope of raising $20,000 for our work. At the same time, the bank will also be launching the three-year GOAL project to provide financial education, life skills and employability training to 8,000 adolescent girls to empower them to play a more active role in their communities and the economy. The programme has been rolled out in Hue and will expand to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City over 2015 and 2016.

In the Living with HIV programme, we have partnered with AIESEC, the world’s largest student-run organisation, to raise awareness among students about the prevention and treatment of HIV. The bank also organised many visits to centres of HIV-infected people to hand gifts and encourage them to live life to the fullest. To care for the environment, we have made lots of efforts such as a tree-planting campaign, stirring up Go Green spirit, and raising funds to further environment initiatives.

As part of our wider CSR commitments, the executive board of Standard Chartered Vietnam visited Hoi An’s Nguyen Khuyen Secondary School in February where they organised eye screening and presented gifts to more than 250 students. The bank also presented 10 computers to the school and committed $25,000 to help construct a three-storey building, providing teachers and pupils with proper, weather resistant rooms and recreation facilities. Before that, volunteers from the bank and Korean universities constructed 20 houses for the needy in Ben Tre province. All above underline our aspirations for Vietnam.

How has the performance of Standard Chartered Vietnam been appraised by the State Bank?

The Governor of the State Bank of Vietnam conferred the Excellent Labour Collective Award to Standard Chartered Bank Vietnam for a second consecutive year in recognition of our achievements in delivering strong performance, demonstrating effective compliance and its great support to communities in 2013. This recognition will inspire us to create an even greater level of services and commitment to all our clients and stakeholders, and to deliver on our brand promise of being here for good.

What are some important achievements in corporate support Standard Chartered has obtained in Vietnam?

We are a leader in structured trade finance in Vietnam. In January we signed a $70 million structured trade finance facility to provide An Giang Plant Protection Joint Stock Company (AGPPS) with working capital, allowing AGPPS to develop its big paddy field model in the Mekong Delta. The facility, which made us the first foreign bank to support the development of the big paddy field model, was followed by another agreement the bank signed in April to supply a $22 million structured trade finance facility to Tin Nghia, one of the Vietnam’s leading coffee exporters, to assist the corporation to further develop its coffee business. Last year, we inked an agreement to supply a USD24 million facility for Simexco Dak Lak – the 2nd biggest State-owned corporation in Vietnam in coffee aggregation, processing and exporting.

We continuously expand our operations and investments in Vietnam. Earlier this month, the bank’s private equity arm SCPE invested $90 million into AGPPS, also the largest distributor of rice seeds in Vietnam. This follows a $35 million investment in Golden Gate, one of the country’s largest domestic developers and operators of full service restaurants. SCPE will provide strategic input into both companies’ business planning and support the management in their development plans.

Standard Chartered is recognised as a leading online banking service provider in Vietnam. What accounts for this success?

We are also ahead of customer demand in terms of online services. Standard Chartered Vietnam recognised this trend early and is at the forefront of digital banking. That we won Global Finance’s Best Consumer Internet Bank in Vietnam Award for three consecutive years 2012-2014 underlines this fact. We achieved this because of our strategy to attract and service online customers, our success in getting clients to use web applications, the growth of our online customer base, our breadth of products, and the evidence of tangible benefits gained from our internet initiatives, web site design and functionality.