Hanoi (VNA) – As the traditional Lunar New Year (Tet) festival is justaround the corner, commercial banks are offering a wide range of promotionalprogrammes and financial solutions to encourage cashless payment during the peakshopping season.

Whentransferring money, conducting QR code or credit card payments, paying power orwater bills, or opening online saving accounts via VPBank NEO – an app ofVPBank, users will have a chance to play a game with gifts worth over 20billion VND (819,200 USD) in total, the Sai Gon Giai phong (Liberated Saigon)daily reported.

Toattract clients to non-cash transactions, Sacombank has opened a programmefeaturing 352 chees of gold (each chee is equal to one-tenth of a tael) asgifts and different types of refund for those making QR code payments via the Sacompayapp of Sacombank.

Manycommercial banks like MSB, VPBank, and TPBank have also added the function ofgiving “li xi” (lucky money) to their apps. Users of this function will have achance to receive gifts worth up to hundreds of millions of VND.

NguyenDuc Lenh, Deputy Director of the State Bank of Vietnam branch in Ho Chi MinhCity, said cashless payment services are convenient and cost- and time-saving forboth sellers and buyers. Such services of banks and intermediary payment institutionsalso help boost sales and revenue for business activities, especially duringshopping seasons like Tet or big holidays.

Capitalisingon the soaring demand for financial transactions at not only large shoppingcentres and supermarkets, commercial banks are also running many preferential programmesand solutions for business households and small traders at traditional markets.

Aleader of Nam A Bank said the promotion of the QR code payment use among smalltraders and business households has contributed to a safe and modern paymentenvironment and facilitated digital transformation in traditional businessactivities. It has also helped them improve competitiveness and service quality.

Besides,the enhancement of modern payment services has also helped ease the moneywithdrawal pressure at automated teller machines (ATMs) ahead of Tet and major holidays.As a result, cashless payment is becoming popular in cities and people nolonger have to wait in long queues at ATMs for money withdrawal.

Accordingto the National Payment Corporation of Vietnam (NAPAS), money withdrawals fromATMs have been on a downward trend over the past year. In particular, 2023recorded a sharper decline in the number of withdrawals from ATMs compared toprevious years to make up only 3.6% of all transactions. Meanwhile, the NAPASsystem handled over 20 million transactions each day on average and sawincreases of 52% in the volume and 12% in the value of transactions from2022./.