A policy of extending or postponing debt and maintaining the same debt groups for customers has been applied by the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) since March 2020 and has been extended to the present. Regulations were issued mainly towards providing banks with a mechanism to delay recognition and provisioning and to create the conditions to extend timelines for real estate investors to resolve their approaching debt obligations. The sudden acceleration of credit in the closing month of 2023 may have caused bank bad debt ratios to hit a lower level in the fourth quarter. However, this ratio is likely to increase again in the first half of 2024, as credit growth slows and macro-economic factors show no clear signs of improvement.