Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirement for the MSc in Finance FINANCE DISSERTATION ON THE IMPACTS OF INCOME DIVERSIFICATION ON COMMERCIAL BANK PERFORMANCE: THE CASE OF VIETNAM Le Kieu Trinh ID No: 18045124 Intake 5 Supervisor: Dr. Roberto Ercole September 2022 17014129073441000000 Abstract Financial institutions have really been able to record higher income from their non- traditional revenue sources as a result of policies with financial liberalization, as shown in the majority of banks developing or engaging in non-intermediation operations. Although the majority of commercial banks are renowned for making the majority of their money from interest-based sources, there has been a steady trend in recent years as they have begun to diversify by chasing non-interest-based forms of income. The purpose of this study was to determine how revenue diversification affected the effectiveness of commercial banks in Vietnam.
Between 2017 and 2021, a census of 30 Vietnamese commercial banks was undertaken. For the employed period, a dataset was gathered from the yearly financial statements of 30 banks. The analysis used a multiple regression model using a descriptive research methodology. The Herfindahl-Hirshman index was adopted to assess income diversification, and six control variables—bank size, debt to deposit ratio, equity ratio, deposit ratio to equity ratio, inflation, and GDP growth—were also taken into consideration.
The study discovered a significant relationship between income diversification and commercial banks' efficiency. The impact was statistically significant, according to the regression result. While equity ratio had a negative impact on efficiency, deposit ratio and GDP growth had positive, significant impacts. However, there was a statistically significant link.
The outcomes also showed that the impact of the other factors on the effectiveness of Vietnamese commercial banks was insignificant. According to the study, it is essential to create revenue diversification methods that are uniquely designed for each commercial bank. Therefore, this study recommends that bank policymakers and regulators develop suitable policies that can be utilized to sustain financial stability throughout the whole banking industry. 2 Acknowledgement This dissertation would not have been accomplished completely without the assistance of several people.
I want to start by sincerely thanking my thesis advisor, Dr. Roberto Ercole, for his enthusiastic support and dedication during the whole process. Without his guidance and assistance, this project could not have been completed. I would also want to thank all of my instructors and friends at BAV.
Not only brought knowledge for me, they also encouraged me to complete my thesis. 3 Table of Contents Abstract .3 List of Tables. Research aim and motivation. Scope of the study.
Significant of the thesis. The resource-based theory. The signalling theory. Banking sector and the practice of diversification in Vietnam.
Evidences in Vietnam. Limitations of the research in the context of Vietnam. DATA AND METHODOLOGY. Description of dependent variables.
Description of independent variables and Expected signs of the variables21 3. Model selection and Diagnostic tests. Results of Hausman test and Breusch-Pagan test. Diagnostic tests and GLS approach.
REGRESSION RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. Impacts of Income Diversification on Vietnamese bank performance. Differences between the impacts of Income Diversification on Bank profitability across ownership types .62 Appendix 1 – List of sampled commercial banks and raw data.62 Appendix 2 – Regression results under different methods.68 Appendix 3 – Results of diagnostic tests .69 5 List of Tables Table 1: Description of independent variables and expected signs. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Table 2: Methodologies of experimental studies. 23 Table 3: Correlation matrix and VIF values. 27 Table 4: Descriptive statistics. 30 Table 5: Impacts of Income diversification on Vietnamese bank profitability.
32 Table 6: GLS regression of income diversification and bank financial return across ownership types. Research aim and motivation The banking industry has always been regarded as a remarkable financial industry worldwide. Commercial banks play an important and essential role in economic activities and systems as they are financial institutions that take deposits and use them to provide loans and invest, thereby promoting efficient economic growth. In particular, banking activities play a crucial role in effectively mobilizing and allocating financial flows as well as providing services and utilities in terms of financial and monetary circulation (Casu et al, 2016).
Therefore, identifying the factors that determine the financial performance of commercial banks is always an urgent need as the health of banks is not only significant to the stability of the financial markets, but also related to the development of the economy. In the previous period, Vietnam also suffered from the economic recession caused by the 2008 financial crisis, like other countries in the world (Nguyen, 2012). This crisis has made it difficult for businesses to operate while interest rates have risen, which has resulted in businesses being insolvent and pushing up bad debts (Ho and Ho, 2018). This made the bank's profits decrease significantly because banks do not earn interest on loans, do not grow credit, increase provisioning according to regulations of the State bank.
In addition, the combination of the trend of liberalizing market interest rates, fierce competition between banks, and the impact of the industrial revolution 4.0 in these days puts great pressure on operations based on the traditional profit model (Nguyen et al, 2021). In the context of the economic crisis and recession caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the government prioritizes stability. Therefore, tight monetary policy is used and expected for the following years and credit activities from banks will be affected. Moreover, the requirement to implement the capital adequacy ratio (CAR) in accordance with Basel II standards also puts pressure on banks (Ho and Vo, 2019; Nguyen, 2020).
This makes it difficult for credit to increase. Therefore, in order to reduce the dependence 7 of bank profits on customer credit, diversification of income sources in the bank is necessary. In the world, the system of financial institutions is increasingly improving to come to an effective operation to meet the increasing needs of the actors in the economy. The integration of the world trend is inevitable and objective for other countries as well as for Vietnam.
Along with the world trend, banking activities in Vietnam are transforming and focusing on diversifying products and services, applying advanced technology in addition to traditional services (Dang and Dang, 2020). Because of these characteristics, Vietnam provides an attractive context to investigate the factors that influence the efficiency of banks to improve profitability. Therefore, the impact of income diversification on bank profitability with evidence from Vietnamese commercial banks was selected for study. Research objectives Based on previous theoretical foundations in both Vietnam and other countries around the world, this thesis mainly focuses on the influence of income diversification on the performance of commercial banks in Vietnam.
In addition, a number of recommendations on income diversification at Vietnamese joint stock commercial banks are also provided in this thesis to increase financial performance for banks, especially in the context of current globalization. In particular, this study focuses on the efficiency of joint stock commercial banks based on an important indicators ROA. The main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of factors including income diversification, bank size, total equity to total assets ratio, total deposits to total assets, total debts to total assets ratios, GDP and inflation on the financial performance of joint stock commercial banks in Vietnam. Research questions This study was conducted by the following 2 research questions: How does income diversification affect business performance at Vietnamese joint stock commercial banks? What are the effects of income diversification on state-owned banks and private banks and what is the reason behind the differences between the impacts? 1.
Scope of the study This study analyzes the annual financial statements of 30 banks for the period from 2017 to 2021, using panel data regression to measure the impact of income diversification on business performance of joint stock commercial banks in Vietnam. The influence of other independent variables including macro variables and bank-specific factors is also evaluated through a number of econometric methods such as descriptive approach and regression functions. Research structure This thesis consists of 6 main chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the rationale of the topic, the research objectives, the research questions, the research objectives and the scope as well as the importance of the topic.
An overview of previous studies on the same topic is given in chapter 2. Chapter 3 deals with methodology and data collection. Chapter 4 provides interpretation and discussion about descriptive statistics and regression results. Chapter 5 provides the final conclusions as well as recommendations.
Chapter 6 concludes for the final results. Significant of the thesis 9 Through the discussion of these issues, this study provides contributions and empirical evidence for bank administrators as well as policy makers on investigating the link between income diversification and profits of Vietnamese joint stock commercial banks. The thesis has pointed out three methods of income diversification at Vietnamese commercial banks, including: developing products and services using high technology and outstanding features, developing convenient card services for both at home and abroad, develop non-credit services with the additional use of new advanced information technologies. The thesis also focuses on clarifying the factors that affect the diversification of income at commercial banks, including subjective factors of commercial banks such as Equity ratio and Deposit ratio; and external factors such as GDP growth.
On the basis of secondary data sources and research results, the thesis has proved that income diversification is an urgent requirement of Vietnamese commercial banks today. On that basis, the thesis proposes 3 suitable solutions for income diversification with the current situation of Vietnam's banking industry. Depending on their capacity and service diversification strategy, Vietnamese commercial banks can choose the proposed solutions to apply in practice. As a result, they have more basis to come up with ideas to improve the bank's profitability through stable income.
The resource-based theory Resource-based theory was first appeared when Penrose (1959) suggested that internal resources are one of the sources of competitive advantage for enterprises. This view was followed by Wernerfelt (1984) and later by Dierickx and Cool (1989), Barney (1991). The main core of this theory is to find the answer to the question of why some firms can gain a competitive advantage over peers in the same industry on the basis of an analysis of their internal resources. Enterprise resources are expressed in many different forms.
Accordingly, the resources of the enterprise are divided into three main categories: physical capital resources, human capital resources and organizational capital resources (Barney, 1991). In which, the first source includes factories, enterprises, locations and materials; The second resource is the knowledge, intuition, judgment, experience and learning ability of employees, and the last resource includes organizational structure, coordination system in the organization, informal relationships inside and outside the firm (Barney, 1991). Besides, Grant (1991) divided enterprise resources into two main categories: tangible resources and intangible resources. Accordingly, tangible resources include financial resources such as own capital, ability to raise capital; Tangible physical resources such as production scale, factory location, production sophistication, input materials or flexibility of the factory system.
Intangible corporate resources such as technological know-how or corporate reputation. Accordingly, technological know-how such as intellectual property, patents; Reputation includes factors such as well-known brands, reliability, good relations with suppliers, customers, authorities; Human resources such as knowledge, skills, loyalty and suitability of employees for the business. It can be seen that both Barney (1991) and Grant (1991) argue that the supplier relationship is an intangible resource of the enterprise and the authors of this theory have agreed that the firm's resource is the decisive factor for the competitive advantage and 11 business performance of the enterprise. Wernerfelt (1984) also pointed out that if an enterprise makes good use of certain special resources of the enterprise, it can create resource position barriers that will inherently help the business to improve its operational efficiency.
However, not all resources can help create a competitive advantage for businesses.