VietinBank Brand Guidelines: Incombank 1988, a 2009 CTG Listing & MUFG

A specialised bank split from the central bank.

VietinBank dates from 26 March 1988, when it was separated from the State Bank of Vietnam under Decree 53/HĐBT of the Council of Ministers, the bank says on its history page. Its registered English name is Vietnam Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Industry and Trade; in Vietnamese it is Ngân hàng Thương mại Cổ phần Công Thương Việt Nam. VietinBank is the trading name, and the head office is in Hanoi.

Vietnamese Wikipedia sets out the early steps. In 1988 a set of specialised banks was created by decree; on 14 November 1990 the industry-and-trade bank became the Vietnam Bank for Industry and Trade; it was registered as a state enterprise in March 1993 and re-established in September 1996. For two decades it traded internationally as Incombank. English Wikipedia, citing a 2005 study of Vietnamese banking by Kovsted, Rand and Tarp, describes Incombank as one of the first four commercial banks of the country’s two-tier banking system and gives 1991 for that step, while the bank itself and other sources give 1988 as its founding year.

The modern name arrived on 15 April 2008, when Incombank became VietinBank, according to Vietnamese Wikipedia. Equitisation followed quickly: the Prime Minister approved the plan in September 2008, a domestic share offering was held on 25 December 2008, and the new joint-stock bank received its operating licence on 3 July 2009. Its shares have traded on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange under the code CTG since 16 July 2009, the bank says. English Wikipedia adds that the State Capital Investment Corporation became its first strategic partner in October 2010.

Before the listing, the bank’s lending leaned towards the state sector. English Wikipedia, again citing the 2005 study, says that around 2000 its loans went mostly to large government programmes in priority sectors such as postal services, communications, processing and construction materials. It received a government recapitalisation in December 2002 that roughly doubled its charter capital, and in 2011 it raised capital twice more by issuing shares to existing shareholders, after which state shareholders held 80.3 percent, the encyclopedia says.

Deposits, trade finance and a digital rebuild.

The bank divides its own story into three phases: “construction” from 1988 to 2013, “consolidation” from 2013 to 2020 and “transformation” since 2021, the last built around a programme of digital change across products, services and management. Its core lines, as it lists them, are deposits and loans for organisations and individuals, payment services, foreign exchange, international trade finance and the discounting of commercial papers and bonds.

Much of the brand now lives in named digital products. The retail app is VietinBank iPay Mobile, and companies bank through VietinBank eFAST. The bank says five of its products and services won Sao Khue Awards in 2025, among them iPay Mobile, the gold product digiGOLD, eFAST XMATE and the virtual assistant VietinBank Genie, and that in 2024 it was named a Vietnam National Brand for the eighth year in a row. Its website also sells life and non-life insurance from partner companies, investment fund certificates and gold alongside deposits, loans and cards.

Vietnamese Wikipedia records that VietinBank announced a new brand identity on 3 May 2017, and gives its Vietnamese slogan as “Nâng giá trị cuộc sống,” roughly “raising the value of life.” The bank’s published mission speaks of serving clients, shareholders, employees, partners and the community “in pursuit of sustainable country development,” and its vision sets targets in the Asia-Pacific region for 2030 and 2045. Its five core values begin with integrity and innovative thinking.

How the region’s banks present themselves.

Banks in Malaysia and Vietnam tend to present themselves through a bold wordmark or a short set of initials, often set in a single strong colour. Red, green, blue and orange recur across the sector, and many names work in two languages at once: a Malay or Vietnamese name for home customers and an English form or abbreviation for markets, filings and overseas branches. Several of the banks in this guide are known chiefly by initials that began as the names of older holding companies or merged institutions.

In Malaysia, Islamic banking usually sits beside the conventional bank as a range of its own, often run through a separate subsidiary with Shariah-compliant deposits, financing and cards. Public Bank, for example, says it began Islamic banking in 1993 and moved that business into Public Islamic Bank in 2008, while RHB offers its Islamic products through RHB Islamic Bank. RHB’s Sinar Credit Card-i, launched in November 2026, shows the “-i” suffix some Malaysian banks use for Islamic products.

Bank websites in both countries are organised around everyday tasks: deposits and savings accounts, home and vehicle loans, cards, QR payments and mobile apps. In Malaysia the national QR standard, DuitNow QR, was launched by PayNet in July 2019, according to Public Bank, whose own site lists DuitNow QR and its MyPB app under mobile banking. Photography tends to show branches, city skylines, head-office towers and customers at counters or on phones rather than abstract imagery.

Much of how these banks describe themselves appears in formal documents. Listed banks publish annual reports and, increasingly, sustainability reports, and their corporate websites group these with investor pages, milestone timelines and anniversary campaigns. This guide draws on those pages, on encyclopedia entries and on dated press reports, and marks where a fact rests on a bank’s own word.

The State, MUFG and a network abroad.

The state remains the controlling shareholder. VietinBank’s investor-relations page lists the State, with the State Bank of Vietnam as its ownership representative, alongside MUFG Bank and other shareholders, and gives a foreign ownership limit of 30 percent. The partnership with the Japanese bank began formally in May 2013, after MUFG bought 19.73 percent of VietinBank, VietNamNet reported in May 2023, when the two banks marked ten years together at a ceremony in Hanoi on 19 May. The paper said they were then running a technical cooperation agreement in four areas: corporate clients, retail customers, risk management and compliance, and development strategy. VietinBank’s own page on the partnership names MUFG’s other South-east Asian partner banks as Krungsri in Thailand, Security Bank in the Philippines and Bank Danamon in Indonesia.

Outside Vietnam, the bank says it has two branches in Germany, a representative office in Myanmar and a subsidiary bank in Laos, with correspondent relationships across more than 100 countries and territories. At home it runs representative offices in Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang, a trade finance centre and its own training school. English Wikipedia lists a family of companies under the VietinBank name, including VietinBank Securities, VietinBank Leasing, VietinBank Insurance and a gold and jewellery company, and names the bank as a founder of Indovina Bank, which it describes as the first joint-venture bank in Vietnam.

For a design guide, VietinBank shows how a state-founded commercial bank can carry a long registered Vietnamese name and a short international trading name side by side, then rebuild its everyday products as named apps under that short name. Compare Vietcombank and BIDV, two more Vietnamese banks in this series. For this guide we use a deep navy and a lantern red on rice paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep VietinBank’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.