Some banks have started charging fees for accounts with balances under VND500,000.

Vietnam Export Import Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Eximbank) has just announced an adjustment to account management fees and SMS Banking fees for individual customers, effective from today (December 1).

In order to encourage customers to use digital banking services and filter active accounts and manage “forgotten” accounts, Eximbank will charge an account management fee of VND11,000/month for accounts with an average balance of less than VND500,000/month, effective from December 1.

Previously, the average monthly balance to be exempt from account management fees as prescribed by Eximbank was 300,000 VND/month.

In addition, this bank also charges SMS Banking service fees for Gold and Platinum individual customers since December, at VND90,000/quarter/subscriber and is free for Gold and Platinum customers participating in the Combo Casa package.

SMS Banking fees based on the number of messages have been implemented by banks for over a year to encourage customers to switch to free OTT services - a form of balance change notification via banking applications, helping to reduce costs for both users and banks.

Recently, Vietnam International Commercial Joint Stock Bank (VIB ) also implemented a new fee policy from December 2025. Payment accounts that do not generate any transactions for 12 consecutive months or more will be charged a fee of VND 10,000/month (excluding VAT), called the "personal account freezing" fee.

For inactive accounts with insufficient balance to collect fees, VIB will deduct the remaining balance into the prescribed fees; the uncollected fees will be waived for customers.

VIB recommends that if customers no longer need to use the account, they can go to a branch/transaction office to close the payment account.

Vietnam Prosperity Bank ( VPBank ) stipulates that regular payment accounts (Autolink) with an average balance of less than 2 million VND are subject to a fee of 10,000 VND/month, and maintaining a balance of 2 million VND or more will be exempted. Meanwhile, Military Bank (MB) waives account management fees if customers maintain a minimum balance of 50,000 VND.

The above move shows that the bank is making efforts to clean up customer data and only maintain “live” accounts according to the general policy of the entire industry.

According to the latest data updated by the State Bank, as of November 14, the entire banking industry had more than 136.1 million individual customer records (CIFs) and more than 1.4 million corporate customer records that were biometrically verified via chip-embedded citizen identification cards or the VneID application./.

According to VNA

Source: https://baothanhhoa.vn/mot-so-ngan-hang-bat-dau-thu-phi-voi-tai-khoan-co-so-duoi-500-000-dong-270438.htm