Disparities in banking information transparency in Southeast Asian countries
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Minh Phuong Nguyen 
, Thi Thu Hien Hoang, Anh Phan , Manh Dung Tran
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
As the banking industry has an inevitable position in the economy, more information transparency is always required (Nguyen, Nguyen, Hoang, & Tran, 2020). Being transparent not only helps the banking system to develop sustainably but also constructs a basis for investors, regulators, and depositors to build their trust in banks (Le & Truong, 2019). This comparative research marks the first attempt in measuring and contrasting information disclosure and transparency within Vietnamese, Thai, and Singapore commercial banks. In doing so, we employ the S&P’s transparency and disclosure (T&D) index to investigate the disclosure and transparency of Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore. The results indicate that there is a clear disparity between the level of Vietnamese commercial banks’ information transparency compared with other countries in the region, while the transparency score is the lowest regarding non-financial information including investors’ rights, board remuneration, and process. Results of this study call for improvement in information transparency in Vietnamese commercial banks. Another implication is that the size of the bank has a positive relationship with the amount of T&D, with larger banks having better total T&D ratings. This will increase the need for smaller banks to improve their T&D in order to continue to grow sustainably.
Keywords: Information Transparency, Banking, Disclosure, S&P Disclosure Index
Authors’ individual contribution: Conceptualization — M.P.N.; Methodology — T.T.H.H.; Validation — M.P.N. and A.P.; Writing — Review & Editing — M.D.T.; Visualization — M.P.N.; Supervision — T.T.H.H.
Declaration of conflicting interests: The Authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
JEL Classification: G21, M41
Received: 14.01.2022
Accepted: 24.05.2022
Published online: 26.05.2022
How to cite this paper: Nguyen, M. P., Hoang, T. T. H., Phan, A., & Tran, M. D. (2022). Disparities in banking information transparency in Southeast Asian countries [Special issue]. Corporate Governance and Organizational Behavior Review, 6(2), 236–246. https://doi.org/10.22495/cgobrv6i2sip8
