Confab urges electronic payments

Experts discussed ways to encourage Viet Nam to adopt the new POS (Point of Sale) plastic money system of paying for their shopping at a conference to introduce Viet Nam Banking 2010.

In a recent survey, done by the State Bank of Viet Nam’s HCM City branch, 70 per cent of banks said they should have better technology infrastructure for linking POS machine with other partners.

Bankers at the conference on Wednesday said the success of POS would depend mainly on the service owners, especially if they did not want banks to have records of their sales transactions, to avoid paying more taxes.

POS fees between banks, software, and the cost of promoting the POS service were also slowing the uptake of POS transactions.

The need to encourage more people to use plastic money was the rationale for the Banking Viet Nam conference’s theme “Secure technology application and service development,” Le Thanh Tam, general director of the International Data Group in Viet Nam and Indochina, said.

At present, there are 27 million ATM cards, 42,000 POS machines, and 11,000 ATMs around Viet Nam. Growth for card issuance during the 2006-10 period was 150-200 per cent a year, but the amount of transactions via the POS system was still very low, at around 5 per cent.

“The Government should consider tax incentives for accepting payments via POS. It is the most practical way to pay by plastic into daily life,” a representative of SBV’s HCM City branch said. — VNS

Tags: electronic payments, Viet Nam Banking 2010