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 proposal targets a well-documented structural problem. 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
This collateral proposal is part of a broader digital-asset agenda. 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 matters as ASEAN governments try to balance attracting Web3 investment with 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.
The draft has a date and a destination
The consultation closed on 29 May as scheduled. What was not public at the time is where the draft goes next, and it now has a timetable.
The Ministry of Finance plans to submit the amendment to the National Assembly in October 2026, with a proposed effective date of 1 July 2027 if the legislature approves it.
That is a fourteen-month runway from consultation to effect, which for a change of this kind is brisk. It also means the rule would land after Vietnam's other digital-asset machinery is already running, rather than alongside it.
The market this collateral would come from opens first
Accepting digital assets as collateral requires somewhere to value and liquidate them, and Vietnam is building that on a separate and earlier track.
The Ministry of Finance has shortlisted five exchanges for pilot licences under Resolution No. 05, with a third-quarter 2026 target for the country's first regulated digital asset market. If both timetables hold, licensed venues will have been trading for roughly nine months before a bank can take an asset from one of them as security.
That ordering — venues first, collateral rules second — is the right way round for a reason. A lender pledging against a digital asset needs an observable price, a custodian it can enforce against, and a route to sell in a falling market. None of those exist without a licensed venue, which is what will ultimately determine if a bank lends against this collateral at all.
Permission is not the binding constraint on SME credit
The credit gap the amendment addresses is real. More than 98 per cent of registered businesses receive only about a fifth of total bank credit, from an outstanding SME loan book of roughly US$144 billion.
Expanding the collateral list does not by itself move that. Vietnamese banks decline SME lending for reasons that survive a change in what may be pledged, including the cost of assessing a borrower with no audited accounts and capital treatment that makes small unsecured exposures expensive. The draft acknowledges this by also directing lenders to weigh cash flows, business plans and credit history, which is the part that would change underwriting behaviour if it had teeth.
Digital assets are also an unusual answer to a specific problem. The businesses excluded from credit for lack of land or buildings are not, as a rule, businesses holding significant crypto. The draft also covers intellectual property and future-formed assets — things an under-collateralised Vietnamese SME is far more likely to own than crypto.
Valuing the collateral is the unwritten half
A collateral regime is a valuation regime, and nothing published so far says how the assets would be valued or what haircut applies.
A bank taking a volatile asset as security needs a margining rule, a liquidation trigger and a reference price it can defend to a supervisor. The State Bank of Vietnam has issued none of that, and the amendment sits with the Ministry of Finance rather than with the banking regulator.
Between October's submission and July 2027 is where that work would have to happen. Watching whether the central bank issues implementing guidance in that window is a better indicator of whether this becomes lending practice than the vote itself.
