By Thuy Trieu - The Saigon Times Daily
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| Tran Van Vinh (L), general director of OCB, and Verapun Patanayindee, vice president and regional managing director of Diebold, shake hands after signing the cooperation agreement on Wednesday - Photo: Thuy Trieu |
HCMC – Orient Commercial Bank (OCB) will invest US$1.7 million to develop its national bank card network by installing at least 50 automatic teller machines (ATMs) around the country by the end of this year.
Tran Van Vinh, general director of OCB, said the bank’s five-year strategy was to invest US$3.3 million to provide 300 ATMs and 5,000 points of sale, expand the customer base to 1-1.5 million card holders and eventually become a retail bank. 
To carry out the plan, OCB on Wednesday inked a memorandum of understanding with Diebold, one of the world’s leading ATM and banking technology solutions providers. Under this agreement, Vinh said, the bank would give Diebold priority when choosing ATM providers and the U.S.-based company would offer a preferential ATM price for OCB.
OCB is without its own private bank card system but is an agent issuing ATM cards for Vietcombank, a founder of OCB, with over 20,000 local cardholders.
Diebold has provided ATMs for about ten banks in Vietnam, including Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development of Vietnam, SeABank, VIB and ABBank. The company has also cooperated with France’s BNP Paribas, the strategic foreign investor holding a 15% stake in OCB.