According to the results of a survey of business trends of credit institutions in the first quarter of 2024 announced by the Department of Forecasting and Statistics (State Bank), credit institutions expect system-wide capital mobilization to increase by an average of 2.6% in the first quarter and 12.1% in 2024, equivalent to expectations in the previous survey.

In addition, the outstanding credit debt of the banking system is forecast to increase by 4.4% in the first quarter of 2024 and by 14.2% in 2024, adjusted to increase by 0.4 percentage points compared to the forecast of 13.8% in the previous survey period.

Contrary to expectations of a decrease, this period's survey results show that credit institutions believe that the bad debt/total outstanding loans ratio in the fourth quarter of 2023 will continue the slight upward trend, but is expected to decrease slightly in the first quarter of 2024.

Overall assessment of 2023, the proportion of credit institutions that perceive customers' demand for using banking services to improve is lower than in 2022; in which the need for deposits is considered higher than the need for payments and loans.

In the first quarter of 2024, the proportion of credit institutions forecasting an improvement in customer demand for banking services is lower than in the fourth quarter of 2023, but is forecast to improve even more strongly in 2024. Notably, loan demand is forecast to improve more than deposit and payment demand, different from the developments in 2023.

According to credit institutions, the liquidity of the banking system in the fourth quarter of 2023 continues to maintain a good state and improve more positively than expected. At the same time, the liquidity situation in 2023 is more abundant than in 2022 and is forecast to continue to be abundant in the first quarter of 2024 and the whole year 2024.

Mobilization - lending interest rates are forecast to continue to decrease slightly, on average expected to decrease by 0.3-0.4 percentage points in the first quarter of 2024 and by 0.2 percentage points in the whole year 2024.

Also according to the State Bank's investigation results, the business situation and pre-tax profit of the banking system in the fourth quarter of 2023 improved slightly compared to the previous quarter, but was much lower than expected in the previous survey.

Kylie Nguyen