Techcombank has been building up the landmarks recently. In April, Vietnam Technological and Commercial Joint Stock Bank, to give its formal title, held its AGM to report a 47.1% year-on-year pre-tax profit increase in 2021 to VND23.2 trillion, making it the first non-state-owned commercial bank in the country to cross the billion-dollar profit mark.
Then, in June, it set a capital raising milestone with a $1 billion syndicated loan facility at three to five years, the largest-ever medium to long-term syndicated loan for a Vietnamese financial institution.
Euromoney catches up with CEO Jens Lottner at the conclusion of this deal, initially underwritten by Standard Chartered and UOB with ANZ, HSBC and SMBC joining as fellow mandated lead arrangers, underwriters and bookrunners. The deal felt like a statement, for Vietnam as well as Techcombank, and tells us something about investor appetite in a time of extremely uncertain global outlook.
The bankers “were basically telling us it was a relatively tough market”, says Lottner, albeit helped by the fact that Techcombank had been in the international markets twice before, with a $500 million syndication in 2020 and $800 million last year.
