Augustine Wong, CIO of VPBank, a titan within the Vietnamese banking trade, tells us concerning the firm’s customer-driven strategy in unfalteringly serving tens of millions throughout the nation.
PIONEERING PROSPEROUS BANKING
Offering options to greater than 28 million clients throughout Vietnam, VPBank is a cornerstone within the Southeast Asian (SEA) monetary sector. Though the organisation has labored in retail banking since 2010, VPBank’s latest expansions into different market areas has solidified its place as the one financial institution to cowl the total spectrum of monetary markets. That is achieved by a strategic give attention to the expansion of its retail banking sector, from the decrease mass market to high-net-worth clients.
“This focus centres round a definite enterprise mannequin which differentiates VPBank from our friends and permits us to pursue our strategic targets efficiently,” begins Augustine Wong, CIO of VPBank.
SPEED AND CONVENIENCE
The organisation is proud to be the one financial institution to develop a devoted sub-sector for retail banking that has a various vary of companies to repeatedly meet its clients’ necessities. Initially of 2019, the organisation launched VPBank Diamond, created completely for the prosperous phase (AF) of its buyer base. The bundle offers customers entry to world-class and extremely personalised companies in banking, insurance coverage, credit score and asset administration, accompanied by knowledgeable consultancy to assist AF clients attain their monetary targets. VPBank Diamond additionally offers bonus options similar to airport lounges, healthcare, hospitality and extra to create the last word buyer expertise.
Moreover, in 2021 the corporate launched the VPBank Prime model. As soon as once more, the organisation is the primary monetary model in Vietnam to serve the Mass Prosperous (MAF) phase, offering extra advanced options similar to a global debit card, cell banking, in addition to auto mortgage and enterprise mortgage mixtures, alongside its commonplace companies. Thus, it caters to the superior requirements of the MAF buyer base.
VPBank additionally presents a plethora of monetary options for its family clients, similar to money move administration and mortgage financing, with a give attention to course of streamlining and minimising doc necessities to efficiently meet the wants of households.
Stepping away from the residential, VPBank was additionally the pioneer in a devoted small to meduim-enterprise (SME) enterprise unit, amongst its many achievements.
“SMEs quantify a big proportion of Vietnam’s economic system, but most of those enterprises can not entry credit score and due to this fact symbolize an enormous untapped market. Consequently, the enterprise unit operates a relationship-based mannequin constructed round buyer wants, with an emphasis on comfort and pace,” continues Wong.
Serving as one of many key buyer acquisition channels, VPBank’s department community has additionally been very important to its improvement, to the extent that after 30 years of operations, it has expanded its working community to over 264 branches and transaction factors.
An additional subdivision of the corporate exists as Provide Chain Financing (SCF), which has been working for over a decadeand has turn into a robust proposition available in the market. Presently, the corporate holds practically 30 vital anchors, every with respected multinational corporations (MNCs) and native corporates in Vietnam.
The SCF is supported by 2,000 energetic distributors and brokers who’re concerned in a large number of sectors together with, however not restricted to, car, animal feed, petroleum, aviation, and fast-moving client items (FMCG).
“The most important energy of VPBank’s SCF is our individuals and platform. We now have devoted gross sales and product groups with long-term experiences in structuring tailored SCF options for our buyer base,” explains Wong.
SETTING A PRECEDENT
Having been established in 1993, VPBank was one of many first joint-stock industrial banks in Vietnam. After 17 years of regular improvement, a turning level arrived in 2010 when the corporate modified its identify from Vietnam JSC Financial institution for Non-public Enterprises to Vietnam Prosperity Financial institution, subsequently shortened to VPBank. This marked the implementation of a transformative technique to develop the organisation into a contemporary retail financial institution.
“From then on, we now have continued to evolve and place ourselves as a dynamic financial institution with a robust monetary capability and duty to the native communities during which we reside,” Wong tells us.
Testomony to this technique’s success, in 2022, VPBank turned Vietnam’s main retail financial institution, with its whole property ranked fourth in comparison with different monetary companies within the nation, with its proprietor equities rating second.
That is additional endorsed by VPBank’s fulfilment of the ‘twin aim’, to take care of macro-economic stability and management inflation at a low degree, while considerably contributing to the socio-economic restoration and improvement within the nation.
“Getting into into 2023, Vietnam has continued to develop its capital base and property to strengthen its monetary capability and strengthen the nation’s inside assets in step with worldwide requirements.
“As a collective, we now have attracted many prestigious international monetary organisations and establishments to interact in numerous funding and commerce financing actions in Vietnam,” Wong observes.
Such foresight and prudent approaches have helped the Vietnamese economic system climate any storm, by additional enabling the corporate to broaden its enterprise actions and market share.
“For my part, VPBank is a really thrilling area to work in as we constantly goal to advance worldwide requirements and there are sturdy needs for digital transformation, which will help credit score establishments improve buyer expertise and enterprise effectivity,” he provides.
Together with the developments of on-line and cell banking, many monetary establishments have not too long ago used synthetic intelligence (AI) for buyer account administration and buyer behaviour analytics. Consequently, the size of Vietnam’s digital monetary companies market is forecasted to develop quickly within the coming years.
VPBank harnesses this alteration as a part of its bold imaginative and prescient. “We endeavour to turn into a robust and powerful monetary establishment, contributing to the sustainable improvement and prosperity of the nation and internal communities,” emphasises Wong.
This mission is greater than attainable since VPBank has grown from a mid-range financial institution to attaining the place of being within the high two of market capitalisations within the non-public banking sector, while concurrently holding the main industrial joint inventory financial institution in 2022.
REMAINING UP TO DATE
Lately, VPBank has had its eyes set on growth. “As our enterprise grows, we have to repeatedly improve our foundational methods while concurrently staying related in an effort to meet our companies’ digitalisation aspirations,” explains Wong.
To have the ability to help this upward pattern, the corporate is evolving its retail enterprise to supply digital unsecured lending merchandise to its clients, similar to immediate lending and personalised playing cards. This strategic transfer is clearly paying off as the entire variety of transactions within the first six months of 2023 reached an equal of 85 p.c of the entire variety of transactions in 2022.
In concordance with VPBank’s speedy improvement, is its capacity to remain forward of the curve, materialised by its Infrastructure Stabilisation Programme. “We’re rebuilding and modernising our monetary infrastructure to leverage cloud know-how the place relevant to additional enhance our enterprise capabilities.”
This tenacious venture will foresee an 18 month transformation from the present monolithic banking system to a cloud native core banking system with Temenos Transact, to allow VPBank to fulfil its potential in digital enterprise and merchandise.
The same rejuvenation may also be utilized to the corporate’s software interface programming (API) mannequin utilized in contextual banking. Wong emphasises how the financial institution can not thrive with out increasing on this programme.
“We are going to begin small, construct expertise and expertise, while exploring partnerships with third social gathering ecosystems and orchestrators to construct a multisource API technique.”
As a part of its customer-driven strategy, the corporate may also enhance and modernise accessibility to its monetary merchandise. This contains leveraging open funds and machine studying (ML) to extend various cost use for the shopper and improve the corporate’s real-time fraud detection companies.
On this trajectory, VPBank additionally plans to include the excellent capabilities of AI/ML to remain updated with the most recent improvements within the banking sector. This interprets to the shopper expertise, during which the corporate will utilise AI to strengthen communication channels with its clients on the personalisation of merchandise and repair choices.
“As we department out to new third-party ecosystems, similar to partnerships with FinTechs, we will have interaction clients on each degree and discover co-developed product alternatives,” provides Wong.
DRIVING INTERNAL GROWTH
The growing success of the enterprise and its flourishing development should not with out the devoted workforce at VPBank, that has carried the corporate to turn into one of many largest public listed banks in Vietnam.
As a way to draw and retain employees, the corporate has developed a lovely advantages programme that caters to its workers’ bodily, psychological, and emotional well-being. This helps improve worker satisfaction and in addition win over skills, creating aggressive benefits available in the market.
So as to add to this, VPBank is likely one of the pioneer Vietnamese banks that’s creating an E-learning coaching system, which designs improvement frameworks and coaching programmes tailor-made to every place to create an energetic studying tradition throughout the organisation. A collection of core expertise coaching programmes complement this to drive development and enterprise efficiency.
That is additional mirrored by the inner promotion and rewarding of employees that VPBank’s workers can develop from.
“As an organisation, we give attention to constructing a next-generation workforce that drives transformational development, demonstrated by the launch of the vital roles programme (CR) for essential positions within the financial institution, alongside the successor programme (SP) and the VPBank Gen Subsequent (VPG) amongst extra,” Wong particulars.
ON THE HORIZON
As the corporate celebrates its 30 yr journey of prosperity, it exhibits no indicators of stopping, as demonstrated by its bold targets which have elevated the corporate to the heights of a monetary establishment, packaged in a 5 yr technique.
“The Vietnam economic system goes via a tough interval, due to this fact, VPBank accomplished its strategic targets with excessive readiness to enter a brand new transformation journey. As such, the technique tackles three strategic areas: capital basis, digital and know-how functionality and making a multi-layered ecosystem and segmentation technique,” closes Wong.
Over the past three a long time, VPBank has been stratospheric within the Vietnamese monetary trade because it pioneers merchandise that place its clients on the fore, while exceeding trendy banking developments.