A majority of credit institutions are optimistic about their business performance in 2022, according to the latest survey by the State Bank of Viet Nam (SBV).

The SBV’s survey on business trends of credit institutions in the first quarter of 2022 released this week showed 95 per cent of credit institutions expect their pre-tax profit to grow this year, while 3 per cent expect it to be unchanged and 2 per cent are worried about decreasing profits.

Credit institutions believe their profits recovered and improved significantly in the fourth quarter of 2021, thus raising expectations for an improvement over the entire year.

As for Q1 2022 alone, 49.5 per cent of credit institutions forecast their business results to grow compared to the fourth quarter of 2021.

According to credit institutions, credit policies, interest rates and exchange rates of the SBV are still the most important factors to help them improve business performance. Meanwhile, the main factors hindering their growth include low demand, business conditions and financial conditions of clients, which are expected to improve in 2022.

The liquidity of the whole banking system is expected to remain abundant, with more improvements over the first quarter of 2022, compared to the fourth quarter of 2021.

The survey results show most credit institutions estimated the bad debt of the entire banking system would rise slightly in the fourth quarter of 2021, but they expect it to reduce slightly in the first quarter of 2022.

Credit growth of the banking system is forecast to increase by 5.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2022 and 14.1 per cent over the whole of 2022, slightly revised lower than the forecast of 14.3 per cent in the previous survey.

Interest rates are also projected to remain stable in the first quarter of 2022 and may increase slightly at the end of 2022. — VNS