Vietnam

Is Timo an internet café, a bank, a fintech or an air-conditioned respite from Vietnam’s tropical humidity? It seems to be a little bit of each, all part of its appeal.

Vietnam’s young investment banking industry is still in diapers relative to its more developed, regional neighbours. But when it graduates to greater things, it is likely that SSI Securities will be up there.

Standard Chartered first opened in Saigon in 1904, and likes to spin that is the longest-standing of international banks in Vietnam. Of course, there was a rather inconvenient – at least for the bank’s boosters – interregnum due to the war that ushered in a unifying communist government. But the bank likes to say it never formally withdrew from here, just that operations were put on hold for a while.

As Vietnam’s embrace of the market proceeds apace, the country’s small and medium-sized enterprises sector, the backbone of the economy in most southeast Asian countries, has become a battleground for eager local banks.

Vietcombank, or the Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam as it is officially named, aims to become Vietnam’s biggest bank by any measure by 2020.

Expanded rankings and additional categories, including other comparative and bespoke data, are available for purchase. Please contact Mee Ling Lee at meeling.lee@euromoneyasia.com for our data packages.

The 29th annual Asiamoney Brokers Poll invited chief investment officers, fund managers and investment analysts to take part. Voters represented fund management houses, insurance companies, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds and wealth managers from around the world. A total of 6,540 valid individual responses from 3,100 different institutions, including 411 hedge funds, were received.

The country is still recovering from – and reacting to – the banking crisis of 2012. Over the last six years, the central bank has done much to put the sector back on its feet. But are the banks good enough, or should they be doing more?

After falling in love with Vietnam during a holiday in 1994, Markus Winkler made it his life’s work to get its capital markets up and running. Over the years, Vietnam’s investment guardian angel has helped to channel more than $1 billion into local funds and firms.