Remittances to Ho Chi Minh reached a record in 2020 $6.1 billion

The amount of remittances flowing into Ho Chi Minh City soared at the end of the year and reached a record 6.1 billion USD, up to 12% over the same period in 2019.

Remittances to Vietnam have increased significantly, despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sharing from the Deputy Director of the State Bank of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City branch, Nguyen Hoang Minh, 'this figure is higher than the initial estimate of 5.5 billion USD, especially the year of 2020 is strongly influenced by COVID-19 translation.

Reports from remittances companies have reported that the amount of money increased as the Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday approached. The stressful epidemic situation made many people unable to return to Vietnam to celebrate Tet, so they chose to send remittances to their relatives.

Deputy General Director of Dong A Remittance Company, Mr. Vu Thanh Trung shared that remittances in January of this company reached more than 150 million USD.

US, Australia and Canada are still the markets with the highest amount of remittances to Vietnam. It is followed by countries that are labor export markets such as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Malaysia.

Representatives of some remittance companies said that in some countries around the world, they are facing the situation of controlling money transferred abroad, making the attraction of remittances to Vietnam also encounter many difficulties.

Many customers are happy to make it easier to send foreign currency to Vietnam when the epidemic occurs. Many banks have made it easier for transactions to receive remittances as foreign currency. Therefore, the year 2020 records a high increase in foreign currency receiving transactions.

In particular, a partner of FinFan, MoneyGram International, Inc., a global company with cross-border money transfer and peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms, has started a partnership with VISA, a financial services company, major and multinational electronic payment technology, to exploit fast P2P money transfer service in Vietnam. Through this partnership, customers can transfer money directly to Visa cardholders in Vietnam from the MoneyGram website or instant money transfer mobile applications.

Visa requires banks support money transfer to process the transaction within 30 minutes after accepting the transaction.

The transaction limit per day can be up to $ 10,000 per day and the maximum per transaction is $ 2,500. Not only that, in order to attract remittances to Vietnam, from now to the end of June 30, customers can make money transfers from abroad to Vietnam to domestic VISA cardholders for free.

The latest World Bank report gives a 7% reduction to the total global remittance volume in 2020. However, the amount of remittances flowing into Vietnam still makes Vietnam in the Top 10 countries with the highest remittances, about 15.7 billion USD.