Vietnam to shift to cashless payments for pension, social insurance benefits

The shift to a cashless method will affect over 3.3m beneficiaries.

Vietnam is encouraging pension and social insurance beneficiaries to open a bank account as part of efforts to boost digital transformation in the country.

The Vietnam Social Security said in a statement that it has agreed with the Ministry of Public Security’s Police Department for Administrative Management of Social Order on implementing cashless payment methods in the disbursement of pensions and social insurance benefits. 

“The goal is to increase the proportion of people receiving social insurance benefits through non-cash payment methods in accordance with the Government and Prime Minister’s policies,” authorities said,

The new payment scheme will be implemented nationwide and will cover over 3.3m pension recipients and monthly social insurance allowance beneficiaries.

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Responsible for the implementation are the Ministry of Public Security, Vietnam Social Security, along with district-level social security offices, district-level police agencies, and commune-level police agencies.

Authorities should ensure that those affected understand the principles and implementation methods.

Vietnam Social Security is assigned to extract data of social insurance beneficiaries on a monthly basis. This will be transferred to the Ministry of Public Security, then to the commune-level police for classification to either matched, or unmatched to the national population database and the insurance database.

Authorities should also work on encouraging beneficiaries to receive their payments via bank accounts, and verifying and cleaning the data.

Verified data will then be transferred to the Vietnam Social Security, which will update the deposit account information of each beneficiary that has been standardised into the VNeID software. Data of new and existing beneficiaries will be updated through the national population database and the national insurance database periodically.