The Department of Forecasting and Statistics (State Bank of Vietnam) announced the results of a survey on business trends of credit institutions in the first quarter of 2025. According to the survey results, credit institutions forecast that outstanding credit balance of the entire system will increase by 3.4% in the first quarter of 2025 and increase by 14.2% in the whole year of 2025.
This forecast is 0.2% lower than the previous survey (14.4%) but still significantly higher than the credit growth rate in the first quarter of 2024, which reached only 1.34%. This is a positive signal after a difficult period when the credit of the whole system recorded a negative growth rate of 0.6% in the first month of 2024.
A notable point is that the asset quality of credit institutions also has an optimistic outlook. Credit institutions expect the bad debt ratio to continue to decrease in the fourth quarter of 2024 and continue the downward trend in the first quarter of 2025. By the end of 2024, the average bad debt ratio of the whole system is forecast to be adjusted down, lower than the level at the end of 2023. This forecast shows the stability and clear improvement in the asset quality of credit institutions after a period of tension.
Short-term credit is forecast to grow faster than medium- and long-term credit in both the first quarter and the whole of 2025.
Deposit and lending interest rates are forecast to increase by about 0.2-0.3% in 2025.
Credit institutions expect capital mobilization across the system to increase by 3.5% in the first quarter of 2025 and by 12.8% in 2025. Capital mobilization with terms of less than 1 year is forecast to grow at the same rate as those with terms of more than 1 year in the first quarter of 2025 and throughout 2025. The report also shows that banking system liquidity in the fourth quarter of 2024 remained "good" and continued to improve compared to the previous quarter, although it did not meet expectations.
With a positive credit outlook, 85% of credit institutions expect profit growth in 2025. However, 9.6% of credit institutions are still concerned that profits may decrease in 2025 and 5.3% forecast profits will remain unchanged.
