Inbound remittances to HCM City rise by 8%
Inbound remittances to HCM City rise by 8%
Remittances to HCM City reached US$3.45 billion in the first eight months of the year, a year-on-year increase of 8 per cent, according to Nguyen Hoang Minh, deputy director of the State Bank of Viet Nam’s HCM City branch.
Remittances to HCM City are expected to top $5 billion for the whole year, he said.
According to MoneyGram, a global provider of money transfer services, remittances to Viet Nam last year reached $18.9 billion, a year-on-year increase of 37 per cent.
Viet Nam's inbound remittances rank among the top 10 countries in the world and second in Southeast Asia after the Philippines, it said. Remittances to Viet Nam came from more than 4.5 million overseas Vietnamese as well as a large number of guest workers abroad.
Sheshagiri (Sukesh) Malliah, MoneyGram regional head for the Indian Subcontinent, Malaysia and Indochina, said: “The US, Canada, Australia and France have a dominant Vietnamese diaspora. Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are upcoming migration corridors with a surge in migration of workers.”
In the last few years the volume of remittances from the US to Viet Nam has relentlessly increased. “We are fairly confident that the number will even grow further.”
According to money transfer and remittance companies, remittances to Viet Nam mainly go through four channels – commercial banks, economic institutions, customs or posts. About 72 per cent of the remittances are transferred to the country via commercial banks.
Le Thanh Trung, deputy CEO of HDBank, said remittances to Viet Nam continued to increase strongly thanks to the country’s flexible and stable exchange rate policy.
People who receive remittances tend to exchange foreign currencies for Vietnamese dong to enjoy higher deposit interest rates. The rate on deposits in US dollars has been at zero for more than two years.
Regarding inbound remittances this year, Trung and leaders of many other commercial banks have said that inbound remittances would increase significantly compared to last year.
