Only 51 per cent of Vietnamese adults have credit registry coverage, much lower than the approximate 100 per cent in developed countries.

Le Anh Tuan, director of the Credit Information Centre (CIC)’s Research and Development Division under the State Bank of Viet Nam, said it meant up to 49 per cent of local adults did not have access to credit.

According to Tuan, CIC, so far, has credit information of more than 34 million borrowers, of which 33.4 million are individual customers. The number has increased from the 31.5 million in January 2017.

CIC’s credit information database is currently mainly based on data from credit institutions. It means that only customers who have had credit ties with credit institutions have credit ratings at CIC, and credit institutions followed CIC’s ratings to decide their lending.

Experts suggested that CIC could use information from other industries instead of only data from credit institutions to have more people access credit. This would give banks access to people who did not have credit ties with them yet.

Information from the services of electricity, water, television, telephone and especially telecommunications should be feasible options, experts said, explaining that enterprises can have the same customers even while working with different industries.

Payment information data from industries providing the services would be an important input information source to help credit institutions appraise their customers although the customers did not have credit ties with them. Based on the bills of the services, customers with good payment history would also find it easier to access credit and vice versa.

Such information would also help banks get more customers and better appraise financial status of their customers to avoid risks. It will contribute to increasing the credit quality and ensure banks were warned in advance. — VNS