The Deputy Governor of the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) Nguyen Thi Hong had a meeting with Ms Lida Borhan-Azad, Secretary General of the Asian Clearing Union (ACU) on October 26, 2016 at the SBV headquarters.
At the meeting, the Deputy Governor welcomed Ms. Borhan-Azad and Mr Mahdi Farazi, Third Secretary at the Iranian Embassy in Vietnam, to a working-visit with the SBV. The Deputy Governor said that Vietnam had good diplomatic relations with all current members of the ACU and those multilateral relations with several members, including India, Iran and Myanmar, have been developing fruitfully and would continue to flourish in the future.
For her part the ACU's Secretary General expressed her sincere thanks to SBV Deputy Governor Nguyen Thi Hong for meeting with the ACU Delegation. Ms. Borhan-Azad also briefed the Deputy Governor an overview on the ACU’s organizational structure and operations.
Ms Nguyen Thi Hong highly appreciated the ACU’s role in effectively supporting the implementation of international payment for member countries while recognising that payment between the countries faced several challenges, especially for Iran.
In order to implement the ambitions of State and Government Leaders to expand their comprehensive relationship with South Asian regional countries in general, and Iran in particular, the SBV has recently been making efforts to accelerate cooperation in the banking sector between Vietnam and regional countries. As for Iran, the SBV and the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) signed a memorandum on cooperation in March 2016. Recently, on the occasion of the official visit of Iran's President to Vietnam, the two Governors of the two Central Banks also signed a Record of Discussion in order to speed up the implementation of the content of the memorandum.
The ACU was established in December 1974 when the countries in the region were facing settlement difficulties, mainly due to resource constraints. The Asian Clearing Union (ACU) is a payment arrangement whereby the participants settle payments for intra-regional transactions among the participating central banks on a net multilateral basis.
The objectives of the ACU are: To provide a facility to settle payments, on a multilateral basis, for current international transactions among the territories of participants; To promote the use of participant currencies in current transactions between their respective territories and thereby effect economies in the use of the participants' exchange reserves; To promote monetary cooperation among the participants and closer relations among the banking systems in their territories and thereby contribute to the expansion of trade and economic activity among the countries of the ESCAP region; and to provide for currency SWAP arrangement among the participants in order to make Asian Monetary Units (AMUs) temporarily available to them.
Since it's inception, transactions via the ACU have been constantly increasing. In 2014, the total transaction value reached approximately USD 20.37 billion (an increase of 21.01% as compared to 2013); the average value of monthly transactions reached nearly USD 1.7 billion; in which, India accounted for the biggest proportion of transactions (45.22%), Bangladesh ranked second (29.57%), followed by Sri Lanka (12.93%) and Pakistan (11.72% ).
Thoa Le