Making late investments in high technology could cause a bank to lag behind, but if a bank goes too fast and customers are not ready, it will suffer losses.
Established in 2008, TP Bank has a limited network of branches and transaction offices. It experienced liquidity shock in 2011, but has become a ‘rising star’ in the banking sector.
What attracts customers most is LiveBank, a digital banking service of the Bank. LiveBank can serve nearly all kinds of banking transactions without tellers.
LiveBank has great advantages over normal ATMs because it allows customers to conduct many kinds of transactions, and over banking officers because it can work 24/7 hours with very high efficiency.
To date, TP Bank has 90 LiveBanks and plans to raise the number to 400 by 2020, which is equal to the number of transaction offices of the banks leading in networks, such as Sacombank, ACB and Eximbank.
In the last few years, banks have launched online transaction channels, such as internet banking and mobile banking. However, the channels work independently and customers need to choose the appropriate channels.
For instance, if customers carry out a transaction on mobile phones and the transaction is suddenly interrupted, they will not be able to continue the transaction on computers or at the counter. They will have to restart the transactions from the very beginning.
However, this inconvenience has been settled by Omni-Channel banking platform at OCB. The bank is also going to build a multi-utility ecosystem based on the omni-channel platform that, with only one banking app, allows customers to shop, book movie ticket, connect to social networks and do other transactions with only ‘one touch’.
For VP Bank, digital banking is an ecosystem of fashion, food, shopping and entertainment that fit youth’s taste. VP Bank’s Yolo app targets young people who have grown with touchscreens and wireless connections.
Military Bank now allows customers to transfer money via Facebook app and communicate with customers via chatbot. At Vietcombank, customers can initiate transactions at a separate transaction space named Digital Lab.
If compared with ebanking, which focuses on some major functions such as money remittance, payment and balance checking, digital banking is a new development as it carries out nearly all banking transactions online.
According to Pham Tien Dung, director of the Payment Department, 94 percent of banks have begun building or implementing digital transformation strategies and only 6 percent still have no general strategies. The investments in IT in general and digital banking in particular are not inexpensive.
According to a report on Vietnamnet