While domestic banks are occupied trying to find ways of ways increasing their growth with traditional products, foreign banks are focusing on services for their top-end (VIP) customers.

Namita Lal, Director of a retail bank under the Standard Chartered Vietnam Bank (SCB), said that VIP customers account for 20 percent of Vietnamese banks’ customers and that this is an area where banks can develop their services.

The Hong Kong-Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) is one of the foreign banks pioneer top-end banking services. After the success of its “Priority Banking” package for customers who maintained a minimum balance of 50,000 USD, HSBC has recently launched its HSBC Premier package – a comprehensive banking service that enables customers to access their cash from wherever they live or work around the world.

HSBC Premier will help to consolidate HSBC’s retail services in Vietnam and make it stand out from others in the market, said Louisa Cheang, Regional Director of HSBC’s Personal Financial Services in Asia-Pacific.

Many other wholly foreign-invested banks such as ANZ, Citibank and Standard Chartered are preparing to launch similar services that will target their premier customers.

While ANZ’s top-end services will focus on making its services more convenient and introduce an asset management service for customers, Citibank’s Citi-Gold package provides special services that are suitable for each customer’s individual financial demands.

A spokesperson from the Vietnam Technological and Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Techcombank), the first domestic bank to introduce preferential services for VIPs, said that the economy still faces many difficulties so almost all the domestic banks are trying to develop traditional products such as loans, deposit accounts and payment services to maintain their growth.

In 2009, Techcombank and Bao Viet got together to provide a banking-insurance service for their top-end customers./.