Activating Liquidity: Optimizing Treasury Investment Management in Vietnam
Vietnam’s Changing Corporate Finance Landscape
As Vietnam’s corporate landscape expands in scale and complexity, cash positions are becoming larger, more dispersed, and more volatile — particularly for fast-growing retail groups with extensive distribution networks. Yet often consumer goods and retail businesses typically operate on thin profit margins of just 2–5% and rapid cash cycles, where even small inefficiencies in liquidity management can erode returns. In an environment of fluctuating interest rates, tight liquidity, and evolving investment opportunities, the question is no longer just how to preserve cash — but how to activate it.
Drawing on our work with leading enterprises in the consumer goods and retail sector, we highlight several principles that can help businesses in Vietnam strengthen their treasury investment management.
Treasury as a Strategic Function
Treasury sits at the heart of financial management — responsible for ensuring liquidity, optimizing cash flows, and deploying surplus capital to generate returns.
Yet in Vietnam, many companies still treat treasury as a transactional, back-office function. Cash is frequently fragmented across multiple accounts, forecasts are prepared manually, and investment decisions depend largely on short-term intuition. Meanwhile, external dynamics — from fluctuating interest-rate cycles to tight liquidity and accelerating digital-banking innovation — are raising the bar for treasury performance.
Globally, leading corporations have redefined treasury as a strategic orchestrator of liquidity — one that actively balances security, yield, and agility. This evolution, now emerging in Vietnam, enables companies to transform their finance function from a cost center into a profit center, unlocking new sources of value through structured cash and investment management.
From our work with leading consumer businesses in Vietnam, we have identified two critical areas that determine treasury maturity:
Optimizing Liquidity through Operations
Optimizing Yield through Investments
Together, these pillars help companies move from ad-hoc cash management to disciplined capital stewardship.
(See Figure: Treasury Optimization Framework — From Operations to Investments)
1. Optimize Liquidity through Operations
Liquidity optimization begins within the business, not the bank.
Liquidity optimization begins within the business — not in the bank. Cash flow is the lifeblood of operations, running through every function from sales forecasting and procurement to accounts payable and receivable management.
Optimizing liquidity, therefore, requires close cross-functional collaboration between finance and operating teams. By connecting treasury planning with commercial and supply-chain processes, companies can uncover bottlenecks and design targeted solutions to free up trapped cash.
Our experience shows that even minor operational enhancements — such as revisiting inventory classification benchmarks and accelerating actions can release liquidity equivalent to up to 10% of annual revenue, let alone the gains from more sophisticated working-capital initiatives.
Such coordination turns the treasury from a record-keeper into a business partner that drives working capital discipline and financial agility.
“In essence, treasury optimization is not a financial exercise alone, but an operational one that requires enterprise-wide coordination.”
2. Optimize Yield through Investments
Once operational liquidity is stabilized, the next step is to deploy surplus cash effectively — balancing yield, security, and accessibility. This requires a structured approach across three interconnected pillars: Policies & Procedures, Partners & Products, and Platforms.
(See Figure: Treasury Investment System Management and Setup)
a) Policies & Procedures — Strengthen Governance and Planning Discipline
Establishing formal treasury and investment policies creates structure and accountability in how surplus cash is managed. A comprehensive framework should define planning cycles, cash-sweeping protocols, approval workflows, investment limits, and performance reporting, ensuring decisions remain consistent across entities and transparent to management.
Within the planning process, tools such as rolling 13-week and 13-month cash forecasts, automated liquidity reporting, and a minimum cash-reserve policy help strengthen foresight and safeguard operational liquidity. Together, these mechanisms embed discipline in how funds are planned, placed, and reviewed — transforming treasury from ad-hoc execution into structured capital management.
b) Partners & Products — Build a Diversified and Continuously Assessed Ecosystem
Diversifying financial partnerships and investment instruments enables companies to balance yield, risk, and flexibility in their treasury portfolios.
A structured Partners & Products Evaluation Framework provides consistency — assessing each relationship and instrument based on risk appetite, expected yield, liquidity horizon, and strategic fit. Regular reviews, typically conducted quarterly or semiannually, ensure that portfolios stay responsive to market dynamics and aligned with corporate objectives.
Such disciplined diversification not only enhances return potential but also deepens market insight. In practice, companies adopting structured evaluation models have achieved 15–25% higher investment yields from existing bank products, while unlocking additional upside through money-market funds and corporate bonds.
c) Platforms — Enable Data-Driven Performance Management
Technology is the backbone of the modern treasury. Implementing centralized reporting systems and dashboards enables companies to monitor liquidity positions, track portfolio performance, and benchmark results against peers. These tools transform treasury from a static reporting function into a data-driven decision engine, capable of scenario analysis, performance tracking, and proactive reinvestment. Over time, this helps ensure that treasury governance evolves alongside the business rather than lagging behind it.
The Impact — From Incremental Gains to Strategic Resilience
Organizations that embrace structured treasury management often experience both immediate and long-term benefits. In recent transformation efforts across sectors, we’ve observed that companies adopting a disciplined investment approach can already achieve 15–25% higher investment returns from their existing bank-based products — with further upside when expanding into more sophisticated instruments.
In Vietnam, this shift is increasingly evident among leading consumer enterprises. For instance, Thế Giới Di Động (MWG) — one of the country’s largest retail groups — has turned its treasury into a meaningful profit contributor. Through centralized liquidity governance and active placement management, MWG’s treasury income reached nearly VND 2 trillion in 2024, equivalent to roughly 15% of its pre-tax profit. This demonstrates how a well-structured treasury can evolve from a passive support role into an active value-creation engine.
Beyond the numbers, the deeper transformation lies in how treasury maturity reshapes decision-making. Once liquidity becomes visible, governed, and integrated with business cycles, finance leaders gain the ability to make data-driven, forward-looking capital decisions rather than reacting to short-term pressures. More importantly, they lay the foundation for long-term financial resilience and strategic agility, turning liquidity into a sustainable source of strength.
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Want to know more?
Reach out to our team at Delta West Group to explore our full insights, including:
✅ Treasury as a Strategic Function – How leading Vietnamese enterprises are transforming treasury from a back-office task into a profit-driving function.
✅ Optimizing Liquidity – Cross-functional approaches to unlock trapped cash and improve working capital efficiency.
✅ Enhancing Yield through Investments – Structured frameworks for policies, partners, products, and platforms to maximize returns safely.
✅ Real-World Impact – Case studies of companies like Thế Giới Di Động demonstrating treasury’s role in boosting financial resilience and strategic agility.
