Transaction banking continues to gain traction with plenty of business opportunities brought about by inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Vietnam. As multinational and large corporates evaluate exits from over concentrated geographies to place additional capacity in new markets, Vietnam is emerging to be a major beneficiary of re-location of global supply chains. This, coupled with State Bank of Vietnam’s push to modernise payment channels and move away from excess reliance on cash payments, has driven financial service providers such as Techcombank (TCB) to take the lead in meeting corporates’ payment automation and centralisation requirements.

With a resilient and accessible infrastructure that ensures stability of its commercial digital platform, TCB signed up over one million new customers in all segments and grew its annual e-banking transaction value by 191% in 2019. It has built an edge over other payment players leveraging its distribution channels, brand outreach, same-day clearing and price/fee competitiveness. Noting charges on transfer fee as a key pain point for Vietnamese small and medium size enterprise (SMEs) and mid-size corporates, it offered a zero fee service on Fast EBank (FEB), its internet banking platform.

TCB demonstrated its zeal to implement an automated and centralised payment solution for a large corporate in the manufacturing sector. Huge payment volumes led to manual intensive processing and significant burden on its operations resulting in error, delayed payments and negative impact on supplier relationships. Host-to-host implementation migrated 100% payment transactions to e-channels while automated payment reconciliation drove real-time updates on the status of transactions. The client’s lead time for payment and operational costs decreased significantly. Such capabilities have led the bank to achieve 85% of customer activity on a purely digital basis. The bank reported strong incoming and out-going payments volumes that grew by 143% and 150%, respectively in 2019.

As digital banking shapes Vietnam’s emerging cashless economy, the bank is further embarking on a journey of cutting edge innovation to migrate manual payments to e-channels. “Our objective is to bring client-centric solutions to our target segments where we leverage brand loyalty to rapidly expand our customer base. We are investing in digital transformation to meet corporates’ evolving demands, ideally to be achieved within two to three years,” said Phan Thanh Son, deputy CEO and chief global transaction services officer at Techcombank. Going forward, the bank will continue to focus on the consistent execution of its strategy and invest in digitalisation to scale its business to meet the needs of its growing customer base.