Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City Development Joint Stock Commercial Bank (HDBank) is holding an initial public offering (IPO) to foreign investors this month for up to 20 percent of the company that could raise up to $300 million, a bank official said on Wednesday.

HDBank, as the lender is commonly known, is a retail bank whose vice chairwoman is Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, the billionaire founder and chairwoman of Vietjet Aviation , Vietnam's largest private airline.

The bank would offer each foreign investor a less than 5 percent stake through the IPO and plans to list on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange in early 2018, Le Thanh Trung, HDBank's deputy general director, said in a written note to Reuters.

"HDBank expects to sell 20 percent shares to raise around $300 million and later list on the Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange in early 2018," Trung said in the note.

"We want to be a leading retail digital bank in Vietnam in the next five years," he said.

Under Vietnam's financial regulations, a stock exchange listing and initial public offering are separate steps and a listing may come months after an IPO.

The bank has been focusing on individuals and small and medium enterprises to help grow its profits by an average of 35 percent a year in the past five years, while profits are expected to grow about 25 percent annually in the coming years, Trung told Reuters in a separate, face-to-face interview on Nov. 9.

HDBank has 4.5 million individual customers and around 25,000 small- and medium-enterprise clients, Trung said. He added the bank has access to a pool of 20 million people that are clients from Vietjet Aviation and HD Saison, its customer finance joint venture with Japan's Credit Saison Co .

HDBank expects its net profit before tax at 2.4 trillion dong ($105.66 million) this year, Trung said, or a jump of nearly 110 percent from 2016.