On the sidelines of the press conference on Cashless Day 2025 on the afternoon of June 2, Mr. Pham Anh Tuan - Director of the Payment Department, State Bank provided a lot of information related to the screening of accounts and cleaning of bank data over the past time.
Mr. Tuan said that previously, Vietnam recorded more than 200 million bank accounts. However, through through document screening and biometric comparison, the State Bank only recorded more than 113 million active personal accounts, in addition to more than 711,000 accounts of organizations.
The State Bank also recorded more than 86 million "dead" bank accounts, unable to compare biometric information. It is expected that by September 2025, the State Bank will close all of these unverified biometric accounts to prevent financial fraud.
Also related to the problem of financial fraud, Mr. Tuan confirmed that in the past, the State Bank and other banks have built a shared data warehouse of 350,000 accounts suspected of being scammed.
This data warehouse will be shared with credit institutions for further development. BIDV Bank is the first unit to share about this list. Accordingly, BIDV customers will receive a warning message if the recipient account is a suspect.
After more than a month of implementation, this feature has helped 40,000 BIDV customers stop transferring money, preventing losses of more than 160 billion VND.
In the coming time, some other banks such as Vietcombank, Agribank, MB and Vietinbank will deploy this feature. After that, the State Bank will have a preliminary review and assessment step to learn from experience, before applying it to the entire banking industry.
Another notable information provided by Mr. Tuan is that from July 1, e-wallets will be considered a means of payment. That means e-wallets will be similar to accounts, cards, cash, making payments everywhere.
E-wallets can be transferred from wallet to wallet, transferred from wallet to account, not necessarily through a bank. That will help e-wallets penetrate deeper into the market, especially in remote areas.
According to statistics from the State Bank, by the end of March 2025, the country had 47 institutions providing e-wallet services; the number of active e-wallets was about 30.27 million wallets (accounting for 65.8% of the total of nearly 46.01 million activated e-wallets) with the total amount on these wallets being over 2.8 trillion VND.
