VPBank Brand Guidelines: Hanoi 1993, a Prosperity Rename, FE Credit & SMBC

Hanoi, 1993, and a new name in 2010.

VPBank was founded in Hanoi on 12 August 1993. English Wikipedia gives its original name as the Vietnam Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Private Enterprises; the bank calls itself one of the first joint-stock commercial banks in Vietnam, and Viet Nam News described it in January 2025 as one of the earliest joint-stock commercial banks established in the country.

In July 2010 it took its present name, Vietnam Prosperity Joint Stock Commercial Bank, Ngân hàng TMCP Việt Nam Thịnh Vượng in Vietnamese, as part of a strategic change of direction, English Wikipedia says. The bank describes 2010 as the year it set out to become a modern retail bank, widening its network of branches and transaction points and its sales channels.

Foreign capital arrived early. English Wikipedia says Singapore’s OCBC Bank bought an initial 10 percent in 2006, later raised to about 15 percent, and sold its whole stake to local investors in 2013. In 2015 VPBank moved its consumer lending into a separate company branded FE CREDIT, the bank says, and in 2017 its shares were listed on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange under the code VPB; English Wikipedia counts it as the tenth Vietnamese bank to list there.

For a prosperous Vietnam.

The name carries the brand idea: Thịnh Vượng means prosperity. In 2022 VPBank repositioned its brand around a new mission, “Vì một Việt Nam thịnh vượng” (“For a prosperous Vietnam”), launched with a campaign called “Light Up Viet Nam,” the bank says. VietNamNet reported in April 2022 that the campaign’s free music and light show at Gia Định stadium in Ho Chi Minh City on 23 April used a stage about 110 metres wide with three-dimensional effects, centred on a large cube surrounded by images of a city in lights, an idea the organisers tied directly to the new mission.

The bank has added named tiers and companies under the main brand rather than replacing it. It lists VPBank Diamond, launched in 2018 for premium customers, and VPBank Private, launched in 2025 for wealth clients, alongside the consumer-finance brand FE CREDIT and the securities company VPBankS, which held its own share offering in 2025. Everyday banking runs through the VPBank NEO app, and the website groups products for individuals, household businesses, small firms and large companies.

Other milestones on the bank’s timeline include an exclusive insurance distribution agreement with AIA, extended in 2022; five new core values published in 2023; and, in 2024, what it describes as its first flagship branch and a group model applied across its companies. Behind the brand work sit operational steps it also lists: the BeFit programme of 2019 to streamline the organisation, completion of all three Basel II pillars in 2020, and a Moody’s rating of Ba3 for both VPBank and FE CREDIT from 2021.

English Wikipedia sums up the business as private and retail banking, finance for small and medium-sized companies and large corporates, consumer loans and asset management, with FE CREDIT and VPBank Securities as its specialist arms. It calls the bank a digital pioneer in the Vietnamese sector, a view the bank repeats in its own statements.

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.

SMBC, FE Credit and GPBank.

Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui group became the main foreign partner in two steps. In October 2021 VPBank sold 49 percent of FE CREDIT to Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, and in March 2023 SMBC acquired 15 percent of VPBank itself, English Wikipedia says; the bank’s own timeline records the FE CREDIT transfer to SMBC as completed in 2021 and the 15 percent transfer to SMBC as completed in 2023.

In January 2025 VPBank took on a bank under restructuring. The State Bank of Vietnam announced its decision to hand the wholly state-owned GPBank to VPBank under a mandatory transfer plan approved by the government, Viet Nam News reported on 17 January 2025. GPBank was to remain a separate single-member commercial bank, wholly owned by VPBank, with its accounts kept outside VPBank’s consolidated statements. The paper said the rights of GPBank’s depositors and customers would be guaranteed, that VPBank would contribute capital during the transfer up to a ceiling set as a share of its own charter capital, and that it would pass on its experience to support GPBank’s restructuring. VPBank could later keep GPBank as a subsidiary or sell or transfer it to a new investor. The bank lists the transfer on its 2025 timeline together with a new brand and strategy for GPBank.

VPBank is based in Hanoi and describes itself today as a financial group serving individuals, household businesses and companies of every size.

For a design guide, VPBank shows how a bank can build an entire brand around the meaning of its own name, then hang tiers, apps and subsidiaries off that one idea. Compare Techcombank, another Vietnamese joint-stock bank in this series, and OCBC, its early Singapore shareholder. For this guide we use a prosperity green and a festival red on paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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