A project to develop a financial sector modernisation and information management system with funding from the World Bank and Japan was officially launched at a seminar held in Hanoi on Sept. 22-23.

The project, scheduled to last from now to 2014, has a total investment of over 71.8 million USD, including 60 million USD in loans from the WB, 830,000 USD from the Japanese government, and the remainder from the Vietnamese State as counter-capital.

The project is designed to assist the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV), the Credit Information Centre (CIC) and Deposit Insurance of Vietnam (DIV) to improve operations to meet international regulations by increasing their institutional capacity and building a centralised information management system.

The project comprises three components with the first and the most important aiming to modernise the SBV and the two others focusing on the CIC and DIV.

Addressing the seminar, SBV Governor Nguyen Van Giau stressed that the project shows the WB’s timely and valuable support for Vietnam in general and the SBV in particular, especially in the context of the global economic slowdown.

He expressed thanks to the donors for their assistance to banking sector reform and pledged to effectively use the capital.

Banking and financial experts from the WB, Vietnam , Thailand and Sri Lanka discussed the risks of implementing the project, financial management mechanisms, policies and procedures for procurement bidding on the project, and heard about experiences from Thailand and Sri Lanka .

According to the SBV, the central bank and WB signed ten projects and preferential loans worth nearly 1.5 billion USD for the 2009 fiscal year.

At a signing ceremony for an urban upgrade project early this month, the WB Vietnam Director, Victoria Kwakwa, said that with the two sides’ efforts, WB’s loans provided to Vietnam in the 2010 fiscal year would reach 2 billion USD./.