CIC should look to other industries for data: experts

Other industries could be electricity, water, telephone, and television, in addition to telecommunications, experts said at a workshop held in Hanoi early this week.

According to CIC General Director Do Hoang Phong, the CIC’s credit information database is currently mainly based on data from credit institutions.

It means that only customers who have had credit ties with credit institutions have credit ratings at the CIC, Phong said, and added that credit institutions were based on the CIC’s ratings to decide their lending.

The use of ‘traditional credit information’ or information mainly provided by credit institutions, therefore, limits the number of customers for credit institutions.

Experts estimated that the proportion of Vietnamese who did not have access to credit was very high.

Le Tuan Anh, director of the CIC’s Research and Development Division, reported that by 2015, 41.7 million out of 67.1 million Vietnamese adults did not have access to credit. The amount accounted for 44.9% of the country’s population of 93.4 million.

In the United States, according to IFC/WBG expert Hung Hoang, only 54 million out of 360 million Americans do not have access to credit.

To have more people access credit, Hung suggested to the CIC that it uses information from other industries instead of only data from credit institutions. This would give banks access to people who do not have credit ties with them yet.

He said information from services of electricity, water, television, telephone and especially telecommunications should be feasible options.

According to Hung, enterprises can have the same customers even while working with different industries. Therefore, he said, payment information data from industries providing necessary goods and services would be an important input information source to help credit institutions appraise their customers though the customers have not had credit ties with them.    

Based on the bills of the services, customers with a good payment history of the services will find it easier to access credit and vice versa.

According to the experts, with additional information from electricity, water, telephone, and television, apart from telecommunications, banks could have more customers and better appraise financial status of their customers to avoid risks.

Such information would also contribute to increasing the credit quality and ensure banks are warned early.

CIC’s Anh said that information sharing would also contribute to maintaining or even increasing the positions of Vietnam’s indicator of getting credit ranked annually by the World Bank.

According to the World Bank, Vietnam’s credit indicator improved from the 36th position in 2015 to 28th in 2016 out of 180 economies.