Vietnamese small and medium enterprises (SMEs) account for approximately 97% of all active registered businesses in Vietnam (General Statistics Office, 2025), yet a significant portion cannot access formal credit. The root cause is a Vietnamese SME credit data blind spot: lenders lack the information needed to assess counterparties that fall outside the CIC credit file system. Structured company data fills that gap.
What Is the Vietnamese SME Credit Data Blind Spot - and Why Does It Matter Now?
The Vietnamese SME credit data blind spot is the structural mismatch between the information lenders need and what credit bureaus provide.
The Credit Information Center (CIC), managed by the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) under Circular 15/2023/TT-NHNN, only builds credit files for businesses that already have a formal credit relationship with a licensed financial institution. If a company has never borrowed from a bank, finance company, or licensed microfinance organization, it effectively does not exist in the CIC system.
This is producing visible consequences. VnEconomy reported in May 2026 that SMEs "struggle to access credit due to data blind spots" - naming the data gap directly, not a lack of repayment capacity. Simultaneously, 12 commercial banks reported deposit declines in Q1 2026 (VnEconomy, May 2026), further tightening available lending capital precisely when the economy needs it most.
The entities that could bridge this gap - supply-chain finance teams at large corporates, counterparty risk management departments, fintech lenders - are blocked by the same data gap.
Why the CIC Credit File Misses So Many Vietnamese SMEs
CIC was established in 1993 and now manages approximately 37 million credit records as of 2025 (CIC, 2025). That sounds large - Vietnam's adult population is around 72 million (GSO, 2025) - but CIC files are relationship-based, not entity-based. There are three structural reasons for the blind spot.
First, CIC files are created from member institution reports. A company only gets a credit file once it borrows from a CIC member institution.
The General Statistics Office recorded approximately 940,000 active businesses in 2025 - a significant proportion, concentrated among micro and small enterprises, have never had a formal credit agreement.
Second, CIC files describe past credit behavior, not current financial health. A file may show that an SME repaid a VND 500 million loan in 2021 with nothing further. That data tells you nothing about current cash flow, receivables, or ownership structure.
Third, the Law on Credit Institutions (Law 32/2024/QH15, effective 2024) tightened lender reporting standards but did not expand CIC coverage to businesses outside the licensed credit perimeter. Companies operating in informal trade finance, commercial credit, or equipment leasing outside licensed sectors remain beyond CIC's reach.
What Structured Data Exists for Vietnamese SMEs?
Multiple data layers exist for Vietnamese SMEs even when the CIC file is empty. The challenge is that they are dispersed across different registries with inconsistent update cycles.
National business registration database. The national business registration portal (portal.dangkykinhdoanh.gov.vn) holds registration records for all Vietnamese enterprises, including legal form, charter capital, registered address, industry codes (VSIC), and legal representative name.
DataCore ingests and normalizes this registry, cross-referencing approximately 940,000 active businesses (GSO, 2025) against tax identifiers to eliminate duplicates.
Tax and customs signals. The General Department of Taxation (GDT) manages tax compliance status for all registered enterprises. While full tax records are not public, compliance status, active/suspended tax registration, and some filing indicators are accessible. DataCore processes available signals from the GDT data layer.
Company filings and financial reports. Listed companies on HOSE, HNX, and UPCOM submit audited quarterly financials.
Some large unlisted companies exceeding asset and revenue thresholds submit documents to the GDT. DataCore extracts and structures these filings into queryable databases, covering 100% of active listed securities and a growing portion of large unlisted enterprises.
Ownership maps and affiliate relationships. Anti-money laundering law (Law 14/2022/QH15) requires some institutions to disclose ultimate beneficial ownership. DataCore uses graph embedding techniques to trace full ownership chains from tax identifier inputs, surfacing affiliate relationships that manual lookups would miss.
How Supply-Chain Finance Teams Apply This Data
Procurement, counterparty risk, and compliance audit teams at large corporates are using structured company data to assess SME counterparties - both suppliers and customers - that fall outside CIC coverage.
The workflow has three stages.
Stage 1 - Identity resolution. The first problem with any SME counterparty is identification. Company names are often short, non-unique, and inconsistently transliterated across systems. DataCore Company Intelligence accepts company name, tax ID (ma so thue), or stock code input and returns a resolved entity profile with a unique DataCore Company ID, legal name, registration status, and VSIC industry code. This step alone eliminates the most common source of counterparty confusion in Vietnamese supply-chain portfolios.
Stage 2 - Financial profile assessment. With identity resolved, teams query the baseline snapshot: charter capital, leadership tenure, available financial filing data, and peer benchmarks by VSIC code.
For listed company counterparties, DataCore provides quarterly financials, ROE and NIM trend data, and index membership status.
Stage 3 - Ownership network mapping. Affiliate risk is hardest to detect looking at single entities in isolation. A supplier may look clean individually but share a controlling shareholder with an entity under stress elsewhere. DataCore's graph embedding layer, built on tax ID linkages across 2.34 million entities (DataCore Company Intelligence Service, 2026), surfaces these connections before credit decisions are made.
The DataCore Workflow for SME Counterparty Screening
The steps below describe a practical workflow for a supply-chain finance or corporate credit team using the DataCore Company Intelligence API.
- Submit a batch of counterparty identifiers (company names, tax IDs, or HOSE/HNX stock codes) to the Company Intelligence endpoint. DataCore returns a resolved entity list with unique IDs and confidence scores.
- Query the baseline snapshot for each resolved entity. The snapshot includes registration status, charter capital, leadership data, VSIC industry code, available peer statistics, and structured financial filing data where disclosed.
- Run full ownership traversal for flagged high-risk counterparties (above portfolio contract size thresholds). The traversal returns the complete point-in-time ownership tree, with each node linked to the source registration file.
- Export results as JSON or CSV with DataCore Company ID, confidence scores, and structured ownership chain summary. Each data field carries a data_as_of timestamp supporting audit trail requirements under Decree 13/2023/ND-CP.
What This Data Cannot Replace
Structured company data is a supplementary tool, not a substitute for on-site verification. DataCore resolves the identification problem and surfaces what has been registered and disclosed. It does not replace management interviews, physical site checks, or relationship-specific risk judgment. For high-value counterparties, the data layer should inform a structured credit report, not substitute for one.
DataCore also cannot fully address data for sole proprietorships - estimated at over 5 million registered household businesses in Vietnam (GSO, 2025).
This group registers under a different national policy framework and is not always ingested into the corporate registration database. It remains the harder-to-assess segment systematically.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Vietnamese SME Credit Data Blind Spot
Q: Does DataCore data replace a CIC lookup for lending decisions?
No. DataCore Company Intelligence is a counterparty assessment data layer, not a licensed credit bureau. Regulated financial institutions in Vietnam are still required to query CIC before disbursing credit under current SBV regulations.
DataCore data is used alongside CIC results, not instead of them - it completes the picture at the entity level that the CIC file does not reflect.
Q: How many Vietnamese companies does DataCore cover?
DataCore Company Intelligence covers over 2.34 million verified Vietnamese business entities as of 2026 (DataCore Company Intelligence Service, 2026), sourced from the national registry, tax filings, and disclosed financial reports. Coverage of listed securities on HOSE, HNX, and UPCOM is 100% for active securities.
Q: How frequently is the data updated?
DataCore updates registry and core status fields from the national registry on a continuous cycle.
Financial filings are ingested within 48 hours of publication. Ownership chain maps are recalculated when material ownership changes are detected in the source registries. Every data point carries a data_as_of timestamp.
Q: What API formats does DataCore support for bulk lookups?
The DataCore Company Intelligence API accepts REST calls with JSON payloads. Bulk input supports arrays of up to 1,000 entity identifiers per call (tax ID, company name, or DataCore Company ID). Python and R client libraries are available in DataCore's developer documentation.
Q: Is DataCore data compliant with Vietnamese data protection regulations?
DataCore processes data in compliance with Decree 13/2023/ND-CP on Personal Data Protection and the Law on Credit Institutions (Law 32/2024/QH15).
Business registration and disclosure filings are public-domain information provided by Vietnamese regulatory authorities. Personal data fields (legal representative names) are processed in accordance with the consent and purpose-limitation requirements of Decree 13/2023/ND-CP. Enterprise customers may request a Data Processing Addendum (DPA) as part of their service contract.
Sources: General Statistics Office of Vietnam, Enterprise Census 2025. CIC, Credit Information Center Annual Report 2025. VnEconomy, May 2026. DataCore, Company Intelligence Service Coverage 2026. National Business Registration Portal.
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