Big bank stops increasing SMS Banking fees

From May 1, Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam (Vietcombank) will adjust the fee for receiving notifications of balance fluctuations via SMS (SMS Banking) to the same price of 11,000 VND (including VAT) per month for each customer, without distinguish the number of messages.

With this announcement, Vietcombank’s SMS Banking fee will return to the same as before – that is, before this bank applied the policy of collecting packages, with the highest level up to 77,000 VND (applied from the beginning of this year).

Vietcombank added that, for 3 months (from February to April), the bank also only charges 11,000 VND per person “to support customers” instead of applying the highest fee schedule of 77,000 VND.

Before Vietcombank, the Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BIDV) in mid-March also made a similar move when it announced the postponement of the SMS Banking fee increase.

Although from January 1, BIDV applied a new fee schedule in the style of “use more, pay more, use less, pay less, at least 9,900 VND”, but this bank later postponed this policy. “Temporarily, BIDV still applies the old SMS fee schedule (fixed VND 9,900) in the first quarter of this year,” the bank said.

The move to stop raising fees from big banks took place after the network operator propose SMS Banking collection from the bank for the same price of 11,000 a month – instead of the package collection as before. Each bank and carrier will have a specific agreement based on this proposal. This is the result after many times that banks have proposed to carriers to support SMS Banking fees in the context of increasing online transaction volume of people. And with the new way of collecting the same price, the SMS Banking fee revenue of telecommunications enterprises is estimated to decrease by 20-30%.

Currently, banks are also encouraging customers to switch from the service of receiving balance changes via SMS to receiving notifications on the application (OTT Alert service). With this channel, the bank does not have to pay fees to the network operator, and customers are also completely free of charge for receiving monthly balance change notifications.

Quynh Trang