Building a flexible and sustainable data infrastructure for the banking industry

Attending the event were Dr. Nguyen Quoc Hung, Vice President cum General Secretary of the Vietnam Banks Association; Mr. Le Hoang Chinh Quang - Director of the Department of Information Technology, State Bank of Vietnam; Mr. Le Anh Dung, Deputy Director of the Payment Department - State Bank of Vietnam; Dr. Nguyen Hong Quan - Director of the Cyber Security Training Center, Department of Cyber Security and High-Tech Crime Prevention, Ministry of Public Security; Mr. Nguyen Hung Nguyen - Deputy General Director of NAPAS; Mr. Yea Hong - Director of Customer Relations, Asia - Pacific Region, TDB bai PingCAP; Mr. Chu Xuan Vinh - Chairman of Hyperlogy; Ms. Nguyen Thuy Duong - Chairman of EY Consulting Vietnam Joint Stock Company (EY Consulting VN); and technology experts and representatives of credit institutions.

In his opening speech, Dr. Nguyen Quoc Hung, Vice Chairman and General Secretary of the Vietnam Banks Association, emphasized that 2025 marks an important milestone in the banking industry when many new policies on data, technology and digital transformation officially take effect.

In particular, the Data Law has just taken effect from July 1, 2025, laying a comprehensive legal foundation for the development, exploitation and sharing of data. The banking industry, with its pioneering role in technology application, is entering a new stage of development, in which data is not only an important resource but also the center of all operations, decision-making and customer service activities.

Currently, more than 90% of banking transactions are conducted via digital channels, with more than 87% of adults in Vietnam owning a bank account. Services such as deposits, account opening, card issuance, money transfer, lending, etc. have been completely digitized, helping to shorten time and save costs for customers. More than 113 million personal accounts and 711,000 corporate accounts have been biometrically authenticated and fully updated, contributing to improving security and safety. In the future, the State Bank of Vietnam will issue regulations on closing accounts without authentication data and integrating the VNeID digital identity system for automatic verification. By June 2025, more than 95% of customer data at major banks will be standardized and duplicate information will be eliminated, helping to improve reliability and reduce credit risks. Major banks such as BIDV, VietinBank, and MB have successfully deployed an automatic data cleaning system with AI technology, reducing information processing time by up to 30% and increasing data analysis efficiency by 40%. These results are clear evidence of the efforts of the Vietnamese banking industry in improving data quality, while affirming the important role of data in digital transformation.

Digital transformation and building a modern, flexible and sustainable data infrastructure are key strategies for the banking industry. This is not only related to technology but also to organization, governance and connectivity between credit institutions. Factors such as open integration capabilities, controlled data sharing, multi-layered security and big data analytics are becoming important criteria in long-term development strategies.

The seminar is an opportunity for managers, technology experts and bank leaders to exchange experiences, share strategic perspectives and propose specific solutions to build an effective, safe and flexible data infrastructure. This is also an opportunity to review barriers in data management and exploitation, and identify strategic priorities to improve service quality and speed up decision making.

Dr. Nguyen Quoc Hung hopes that the initiatives and proposals from the seminar will make important contributions to building the banking industry's data architecture, meeting development requirements in the context of the digital economy and increasingly deep international integration.

Speaking at the seminar, Mr. Le Hoang Chinh Quang - Director of the Department of Information Technology, State Bank of Vietnam said that Resolution No. 57-NQ/TW dated December 22, 2024 of the Politburo has created a breakthrough in the development of science, technology, innovation and national digital transformation. At the same time, it is an important step, laying a solid foundation for the development of the banking industry and the digital economy of Vietnam.

Along with that, Decision 2345 of the State Bank related to data cleaning, especially customer data in the banking and electronic payment sector, emphasizes the goal of ensuring the authenticity of bank accounts, preventing the opening and use of unauthorized accounts, and enhancing security for online payment transactions.

A specific example is the connection to the National Population Database from July 2024, to serve biometric authentication in accordance with legal regulations. To date, 119,000 personal accounts and 1.1 million organizational accounts have been compared and cleaned, clearly demonstrating the importance and effectiveness of applying data in developing banking services, as well as preventing fraud and cybercrime.

However, according to Mr. Le Hoang Chinh Quang, data is still scattered and data synchronization standards in the banking industry are still lacking. To overcome this, the Data Protection Law and instructions from state management agencies continue to facilitate the construction of a shared database for the entire banking industry, ensuring synchronization and data security inmanagement and use.

According to Mr. Le Anh Dung - Deputy Director of Payment Department, State Bank of Vietnam, data architecture is an important driving force for digital transformation in the banking industry. In the context that data is considered a "new resource" of the digital economy, effective management and exploitation of data becomes a key factor in financial activities.

The banking industry is generating huge amounts of data from transactions, customer behavior, markets and digital channels. To take advantage of this resource, banks need to build a modern data architecture, as a foundation for analysis, decision making and innovation.

An effective data architecture needs to ensure: (1) Flexibility (combining on-premise and cloud); (2) Real-time analysis; (3) Flexible scalability; (4) High integration capability, suitable for open banking and embedded finance models.

On this platform, technologies such as AI, Machine Learning, advanced analytics can be strongly deployed in fraud detection, service personalization, operation optimization and customer experience enhancement.

However, along with the potential are major challenges in terms of security and legal compliance, especially in a distributed data environment. Banks need to meet new regulations such as the Data Law, Cybersecurity Law, Circular No. 64/2024 on Open API, or Decree 94/2025 on Fintech Sandbox...

Standardizing, sharing and securing data is not only a requirement but also an opportunity for banks to cooperate with third parties, develop digital financial products, build comprehensive customer portraits and personalize services.

To effectively implement, the banking industry needs to focus on 4 factors: (1) Identify clear business goals; (2) Prioritize data quality and governance; (3) Developing human resources specialized in data; (4) Cooperating with reputable technology partners.

In the digital age, data architecture is no longer optional but a mandatory requirement. The State Bank is committed to accompanying the credit institution system in building a modern, safe, and flexible data infrastructure to serve the sustainable development goals of the banking industry.

According to Mr. Nguyen Hung Nguyen - Deputy General Director of NAPAS, in the past time, NAPAS has brought a fast and smooth digital payment experience to Vietnamese people abroad, as if they were transacting in Vietnam. In the coming time, NAPAS expects to expand this experience to markets such as China, Japan, and Korea. Conversely, when customers from these countries come to Vietnam, they can easily scan the QR code branded VietQR Global to pay, as if they were using the service in their own country.

Accordingly, towards 2030, NAPAS sets three major orientations: (1) Bringing optimal digital payment solutions to Vietnam at the most reasonable cost, ensuring comprehensive coverage to serve all classes of people;

(2) Promoting domestic and international cooperation. For domestic use, in addition to close cooperation with banks and payment intermediaries, NAPAS will coordinate with retail units, Vietnamese brands and the Ministry of Industry and Trade to promote Vietnamese brand recognition. In particular, NAPAS has worked with the Banking Association to develop a “Cross-border QR payment handbook” to establish standards to support banks in implementing this activity.

(3) Committed to providing the highest quality service, aiming for the goal of “Zero Downtime” by 2030, ensuring the system operates continuously and without interruption, even during maintenance. To achieve this goal, NAPAS has been comprehensively modernizing its technology infrastructure, from networks, servers, databases to connection methods via API instead of traditional channels.

At the seminar, Mr. Chu Xuan Vinh - Chairman of Hyperlogy, with nearly 30 years of experience in developing IT systems for the finance - banking, telecommunications and services sectors, shared in-depth information on the topic "Re-architecting the banking payment system with Cloud Native".

According to Mr. Vinh, the payment sector in Vietnam is growing at an impressive rate, especially in the account-to-account payment segment, a trend different from countries like the US, where credit cards are still dominant. The NAPAS system alone currently processes more than 30 million transactions per day, with a growth rate of about 10% per quarter.

Mr. Vinh emphasized the role of the Microservices architecture and the Kubernetes platform, which have been strongly developed since 2018-2019, and have now been applied in many banks, especially in the core banking system. However, the implementation also faces many challenges, especially at large banks (Big4) or organizations with high transaction volume, due to the problem of suboptimal resource allocation and system congestion due to large data or terminal errors.

To solve these problems, Mr. Vinh proposed solutions on resource separation, traffic control, automatic system coordination, especially during peak periods such as holidays and Tet. He also emphasized the effectiveness of the hybrid database mechanism to help reduce operating costs and the DC-DC database model to improve availability, minimizing service interruptions (downtime).

Accordingly, Mr. Vinh also shared the results of testing a payment system using Microservices architecture on the Kubernetes platform, with the ability to process up to 600 transactions per second, at a speed of only 10-20 milliseconds/transaction, showing great potential in improving efficiency, reducing costs and ensuring high reliability for banks in the digital age.

During the roundtable discussion at the seminar, delegates agreed that data is becoming a core factor determining the competitiveness of credit institutions. However, effective management and exploitation of data to serve business operations is still facing many challenges. Five prominent issues noted include:

First, converting legacy systems. Most traditional banks still operate on information technology platforms developed decades ago, which lack the ability to integrate, process in real time and do not meet the requirements of deploying new technologies such as AI, Big Data or Open API. Upgrading to a modern system requires large financial resources, while still ensuring continuous operation. Therefore, a controlled conversion roadmap is needed, towards layering data and services to ensure safety.

Second, strengthening the role of data governance. Data governance is no longer a purely technical task but has become a strategic component. Banks need to establish a comprehensive governance framework, including classification, quality assurance, access control, sharing and legal compliance. Data must accurately reflect customer behavior, needs and risks, as a foundation for service personalization. In the context of increasingly stringent regulations such as the Personal Data Protection Law, Data Law, and Cybersecurity Law, banks are forced to invest in governance systems that can clearly demonstrate compliance.

Third, AI applications and associated risks. AI is expected to create a breakthrough in personalization, automation and fraud detection. However, issues such as “AI hallucination”, systems that generate inaccurate information, pose great reputational and legal risks. Therefore, it is necessary to thoroughly test the model, ensure transparency (AI explainability) and still maintain human supervision at important decision points.

Fourth, exploit alternative data. Unstructured data sources such as digital behavior, social networks, telecommunications data, etc. are opening up the possibility of accessing new customers (especially those without credit history). However, the application needs to be accompanied by strong analytical infrastructure, model testing standards and appropriate risk management tools, to ensure transparency, fairness and reliability.

Fifth, flexibility and speed in the digital environment. New generation digital banks such as Timo, Cake, UBank, etc. have the advantage of not being "burdened by legacy", so they can easily build modern data infrastructure. This helps them collect, process, react to data in real time, develop flexible products and personalize experiences. However, this comes with the pressure of legal compliance, security, identity authentication, and risk monitoring as we scale.

At the seminar, experts affirmed that effective data management is the foundation of survival for the banking industry in the digital age. To take advantage of the potential of data, credit institutions need to have an appropriate system transformation strategy, invest in modern infrastructure and build a transparent data management framework. In particular, the human factor, from data experts, technology engineers to organizational leaders, plays a key role in shaping a data-centric bank that operates flexibly, innovates and serves customers sustainably.

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