Digital development has been changing rapidly the economies around the world. In that strong digital trend, digital bank development seems to be the inevitable path of Vietnamese banks and the unlimited technological revolution. FinTech is a race without stops.
Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam (Vietcombank) has just held the launching ceremony of the “Digital bank conversion” project. Vietcombank’s leader said that the trend of digital banking was considered the future of banking industry, so the project was one of Vietcombank’s important strategies with the goal of becoming the leading bank in this field.
The project is expected to help the bank promote the strong development of innovative business models based on digitisation, in order to achieve important business objectives and bring satisfaction to customers through Digital experiences using data and technology platforms.
“Determining 2019 as the year of digital banking conversion, Vietcombank will accelerate the plan to carry out the project, applying technology to develop smart banking services and taking the lead in digital banking conversion. Besides, Vietcombank is also researching to establish a Digital Banking Centre, “said Nghiem Xuan Thanh, Chair of Vietcombank.
At Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BIDV), Phan Duc Tu, Chair, shared that the priority in 2019 would be given to developing a digital banking strategy comprehensively on all aspects of business, processes, products, distribution channels and coordination and system administration requirements, in line with the trend of industrial revolution 4.0.
In particular, focusing on implementing activities of BIDV Bank Centre in association with specific mechanisms on finance and human, focusing resources to accelerate foundation technology projects as a basis for digital banking development, ensuring the safety and confidentiality of information, promoting propaganda, training thoroughly understanding the digital orientation at BIDV to the units throughout the system.
Nguyen Van Le, general director of Saigon-Hanoi Joint Stock Commercial Bank (SHB), stated that the goal of becoming a leading modern retail bank in Vietnam, SHB had built a transformation roadmap to become a comprehensive, efficient and dynamic digital bank.
According to this roadmap, within the next five years, SHB will focus on implementing projects in the areas of Customer Centricity, Big data, Digitalisation, Process Optimisation, Technology and IT Operating Model.
“In order to carry out the IT strategy roadmap, right from 2018, SHB has launched the projects spread evenly across the sector groups. The orientation of SHB’s operation in 2019 is to develop multi-functional retail bank in a modern direction, with greater competitiveness with advantages and always making a difference, based on technology foundation and banking management advanced “, Le emphasized.
In 2019 business orientation, Han Ngoc Vu, general director of Vietnam International Joint Stock Commercial Bank (VIB), said that he would mobilise resources to successfully carry out six strategic business centres, in which technology is a top priority.
Tien Phong Joint Stock Commercial Bank (TPBank), which was even though considered a leading bank in technology activities by the market, Nguyen Hung, general director said, continued to invest in technology development and bank modernisation. With the goal of affirming the name of the leading digital bank in Vietnam, it was known that in 2019, TPBank focused on developing digital banking projects based on the application of successful solutions and experiences of the top companies in the world.
“TPBank continues to deploy Digital Banking platform; transform eBank into a new technology platform; build centralised database and reporting management system; maximising business processes; reducing printing documents and steps to transfer operating documents; planning the infrastructure system to meet the needs of rapid growth”, Hung said.
Ousmane Dione, Country director, World Bank (WB) in Vietnam said the digital development had been changing the economies around the world, with dizzying speed. In 2016, the global economy was valued at $11.5 trillion, accounting for about 15.5 percent of the world’s GDP. This rate was expected to reach 25 percent in less than a decade. Currently, six of the world’s top 10 companies were technology companies, of which Apple had recently become the world’s first company worth more than one trillion US dollar.
Ousmane Dione shared that the WB would soon publish a new report on the status and foundation of the digital economy in Southeast Asia to provide information on the spots well-developed and lagged behind.
In particular, the report focuses on the role of current policies and legal regulations that really facilitate or hinder the development of a favourable environment for the digital economy. This report also compares Vietnam with other countries in the region and one of the five main findings of this important report is that electronic payment is an important part of the digital economy.
The most recent Global Financial Index (Global Findex) shows that only 19 percent of Southeast Asian financial account holders have access to their accounts via mobile or Internet. This figure is lower than the average of the middle-income countries in the world. The government can assist through building appropriate legal infrastructure and using electronic payments when interacting with people, such as paying for government services or receiving pensions. Similarly, digital citizen identification programmes implemented by the government can make it easier for people to access their accounts, ” Ousmane Dione said.
Nguyen Thuy Duong, deputy general director in charge of BankingFinancial Services Department of Ernst & Young Vietnam Ltd (EY), vice President of Vietnam FinTech Club stated that the trend of digitalisation strongly forced banking and finance sector to change to keep up with the times, otherwise they would be left behind or eliminated.
Moreover, these days, customers choose to accompany a bank based not only on the bank’s core products or services, but also on the new experience, as well as the technology utilities that the bank offers.
According to an analysis report on “Global banking industry outlook 2018″ conducted by EY in 221 financial institutions surveyed in 29 markets, up to 85 percent of banks set the top digitisation goal. Most of them believe that investing in technology will help gain certain competitive advantages in establishing and expanding the market in the near future. The technology that big banks in the world focus on investment must include Data and Analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and application programming interface (API).
According to Pham Tien Dung, director of the Payment Department (the State Bank of VietnamSBV), it is not too difficult for customers to access electronic payment channels and banking services, just need to meet the rules “3 -1-0 ” which will make a huge change, that every business must complete within three minutes, the application must respond to customer requests within one second and without the intervention of people in this process.
“The slogan 3-1-0 is very simple, easy to remember. I want to put all banking services on mobile platform,” Dung said.
Duong said that science and technology had been changing humanity with unimaginable miracles, contributing to realising dreams that seemed to be unrealistic for a while. The world would witness more breakthrough inventions. We could also predict, technology would continue to dominate in the financial and banking industry in the coming years.
“It won’t be too far-fetched to expect one day we can sit on a flying taxi and do all the financial transactions on just one mobile phone. Meanwhile, the traditional branch will be replaced by the virtual reality bank model, bankers will be robots created by AI technology and the limits will be no longer the limit “, Duong said.
