TBKTSG
Lorijon Bacchi, director of the Indochina region of the payment card network Visa, said Vietnam has had the strongest growth of all Visa markets.
Vietnam is new in the online payment market but she said last week that it has vast potential thanks to huge growth in terms of international payment card numbers, total number of transactions and total revenue of transactions by cards.
By late last year, Visa had 1.5 million cardholders in Vietnam, an increase of 22 percent, the strongest Visa growth in the region.
The total revenue of transactions of Visa in Vietnam in the first quarter was US$176 million, an increase of nearly 60 percent year-on-year.
Bacchi said she appreciated the potential of Vietnam’s card market given its current strong development of e-commerce.
“Vietnam has the biggest number of people using mobile phones among countries I have ever come across,” she said, adding that 31 percent of the Vietnamese population use Internet, while the country ranked 17th among the countries joining online social networks. Online trade revenue of Vietnamese firms last year rose by 50 percent from the previous year.
She said that e-commerce was a good foundation to develop online payments so that in the future institutions would help to strengthen the online system in Vietnam by making it convenient for banks to join the operation and widen their card acceptance point network, and offer training for bank staff.
The company has cooperated with 30 local and foreign banks in Vietnam.
All card products and money transfer operations are provided by banks while all payment transactions are done by Visa’s system.
Last year, global payment revenue via Visa cards was around US$3.3 trillion.
