While the trillion-dong court cases in the banking sector have not finished, smaller cases such as the loss in customer’s savings accounts worth hundreds of billion dong occurred more often. The recent incident at Eximbank is an example. According to previous information, from 2013 until now, Chu Thi Binh has opened three savings books with a total principal amount of over 301 billion dong. However, as of February 2017, this amount was no longer found in the system although Binh still keeps the savings books. The investigation agency has issued wanted notice for Le Nguyen Hung, former deputy general director of Eximbank’s Hochiminh city branch, who was accused for using fake documents to withdraw capital from the above savings books. The loss at Eximbank this time is a record high level for an individual deposit, but the losses of money have occurred a lot over recent time, such as the loss of 17 savings books valued 400 billion dong at OceanBank, or a 32 billion dong savings book at BIDV. The question is why there are so many losses of money?
In fact, the banking sector is prone to professional ethics risks, because it directly involves money. Over the years, ethics risks of creditors and leaders in lending have created huge bad debts in banks. Now, even customers’ savings accounts have been eyed. Depositors have misplaced their trust as the people having power and chances have actively attacked customers’ savings accounts. For example, in the nine billion dong loss case at NCB, the bank said that a branch leader used documents not in the list of the bank’ forms. The process of depositing was wrongly carried out, but depositor was not aware of. It is easy to see the responsibility of the bank staffs (which are mainly the big bosses at bank branches) in most of the cases. However, in other respects, the problem also arise from depositors as they did not fully understand the bank’s procedures and working method. The common point of the above “minor cases” is that the client arbitrarily signed on blank documents, or were not aware of the contents of the documents they worked with.
The incident at Eximbank showed that customers, even very important ones, can lose money. It raises a big question about the procedure to serve big customers in place outside the bank’s supervision. VIP customers usually require special preferential policies from banks, such as interest rates, or customer care. These customers are rich, and in need of privacy, while banks are ready to please them as they need to mobilise money.
The fraudulent behaviour between individuals and individuals, as well as the naive of customers are unavoidable. However, in a different perspective, Dr Nguyen Tri Hieu said that the frequent losses of money are partly due to the process of performing transactions at banks. Since, there are no specific rules on depositing money and receiving money, each bank has its own mechanism, and management and supervision methods. The results (or consequences) obviously depend on the governance capacity of each CI. Any bank can encounter loss in customers’ account, such as the loss of 500 million dong in ATM account of Vietcombank’s customer in 2017, due to information stolen. Cybercrimes have occurred more and more to Vietnamese banks.
Eximbank’s incident perhaps has made many banks to look back on the working process. Many experts at banks have also advised individuals to actively manage their accounts via SMS Banking or Internet Banking to timely find out the changes in their balances. It is the best way to control at present. Meanwhile, Dr Hieu recommended that external transactions need to be witnessed by a third party. Today, more modern technology also allows individual customers to carry out transactions through the system, thereby minimising the risks and errors from the staffs when using traditional tools.
One year after knowing the amount of money they lost, the individuals involved in the case at Eximbank still have to wait for the authorities to resolve. The case will probably last a long time, especially when Hung is wanted and is said to be in the United States. In fact, so far, most of the above minor cases have not been formally concluded by the investigation units, or courts, in order to clarify the responsibility of each party concerned.
All banks involved announced that they would wait for official conclusion of the state agency. Confirming the legal rights of customers is always a top priority of Eximbank, said the bank’s general director. He added that “Eximbank expects that all concerned parties including the bank, depositors and investigation agency to actively coordinate to soon handle the case in order to protect the legitimate interests of the concerned parties”.
Meanwhile, Yasuhiro Saito, deputy Chair of Eximbank’s Board of directors said that the handling procedures must comply with legal provisions in order to have satisfactory answers to shareholders.
Nevertheless, after continuous news about Eximbank’s case on the press, the bank and Binh are considering an advance payment of over 14 billion dong. However, Eximbank has recently said that it will disclose information when legal conclusion is released, after the second agreement with Binh was said to be unsuccessful.
Depositors have lost money, and bank themselves have also lost their credibility and the impact on brands in the future is immeasurable. The more dangerous thing is the trust in the banking system is also affected. That is the real loss for the whole economy, not only the banks involved. Thus, the recent minor cases are the wake-up call for banks to quickly fix the loopholes in their own system.
