Vietnam's outstanding SME loan book stood at VND 3.8 quadrillion — roughly US$144 billion — as of April 2026, yet small and medium enterprises collectively receive only about 19–20% of total bank credit despite making up more than 98% of all registered businesses in the country. A draft amendment now circulating in Hanoi aims to close that gap by letting SMEs put digital assets, virtual assets, and intellectual property on the table as bank collateral.
What the Draft Amendment Proposes
The Ministry of Finance ran a public consultation from 25 to 29 May 2026 on a proposed revision to the Law on Support for Small and Medium Enterprises. The draft would expand acceptable collateral to include digital assets, virtual assets, intellectual property rights, future-formed assets, and other legally recognised intangible assets — categories that are largely off-limits under current banking practice.
Beyond the collateral list, the draft tells lenders to weigh cash flows, business plans, credit ratings, and market potential when assessing SME applications, rather than defaulting to hard-asset security. The Ministry of Finance plans to submit the bill to the National Assembly in October 2026, with an implementation target of 1 July 2027.
The Credit Gap It Addresses
The structural problem the proposal targets is well documented. Vietnam has approximately 930,000 registered enterprises, with a government ambition to reach two million active businesses by 2030. Many technology-driven companies hold patents, software licences, or intellectual property of real commercial value but own no land or physical premises to pledge. Banks, applying conventional criteria, turn them away.
Vietnam's Broader Digital-Asset Agenda
The collateral proposal does not exist in isolation. Vietnam's Law on Digital Technology Industry, passed by the National Assembly on 14 June 2025 and in force from 1 January 2026, formally recognises crypto assets within a state-supervised legal structure — though not as legal tender. Separately, a five-year pilot framework for digital asset exchanges is nearing the end of its qualification stage: five entities, including affiliates of Techcombank, VPBank, and LPBank, plus VIX Securities and Sun Group, passed initial rounds for the first regulated crypto exchange, expected to launch in Q3 2026.
Tax treatment has also been settled at the transaction level. Individual investors on licensed platforms will pay 0.1% personal income tax per transaction; institutional participants face a 20% corporate income tax on profits; and crypto transactions are exempt from value-added tax. According to Chainalysis data cited by multiple outlets, Vietnamese crypto transactions totalled between US$220 billion and US$230 billion in the year ending June 2025 — more than US$600 million a day on average.
What Banks Would Need to Accept
Credit institutions would need new frameworks to value and monitor digital-asset collateral — assets whose prices can move sharply within days. The draft does not specify haircut ratios or margin-call triggers; those details would fall to the State Bank of Vietnam in implementing regulations. The State Bank previously issued a 2017 prohibition on using virtual assets as a means of payment, a restriction that remains in place and is separate from their use as collateral.
The draft also raises practical questions about custody: who holds pledged crypto during the loan term, how liquidation works if a borrower defaults, and how lenders reconcile on-chain asset provenance with existing anti-money-laundering obligations. Regulators in Singapore and Hong Kong have grappled with similar questions in their own digital-asset secured-lending pilots.
ASEAN Context
Should the bill pass in its current form, Vietnam would be among the first ASEAN jurisdictions to embed crypto and digital assets formally within mainstream SME credit law — not just in a regulatory sandbox or pilot, but as a statutory collateral category. That distinction carries weight at a moment when several ASEAN governments are trying to attract Web3 investment while protecting retail depositors. Vietnam's combination of high retail crypto adoption — 4th globally by Chainalysis measure, behind India, the United States, and Pakistan — and a large underserved SME base gives the proposal a practical scale that sandbox experiments in smaller markets lack.
