Accessible E-Payment System With Mark Morawski, CTO At ZaloPay — VNI Ep.33 Recap

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VNG, the country’s first ever unicorn, has had groundbreaking successes since its establishment in 2004. From paving the way for the era of role-play digital gaming in Vietnam to creating a Vietnamese social network (Zalo) and digital newspaper (Zing) and using its technological prowess and growing popularity to add finance & payment (ZaloPay, 123Pay) and cloud services (vServer, vCDN, etc).

When ZaloPay was launched in 2017, Vietnam’s fintech segment was experiencing rapid growth, thanks to Vietnamese people’s increasing love for everything digital. People started to choose online financial services over traditional face-to-face money transactions. ZaloPay introduced online payments and peer-to-peer lending to solve the problem of spotty bank coverage.

Taking advantage of Zalo’s large database (with more than 100 million users worldwide), ZaloPay ranked as one of the top payment applications in Vietnam, with users making an average of 1.6 transactions per day. 

To further integrate into the fintech market, be the platform of choice for consumers and to expand its services, ZaloPay designated Mark Morawski as its Chief Technology Officer in January 2021. An IT professional with 18 years of experience working in enterprise architecture, strategic planning, application development and investment optimization, among others, Mark shares ZaloPay’s mission to make financial services accessible to Vietnamese people in ways they’ve never been able to.

Why choose ZaloPay?

There’s a number of e-wallet players here in Vietnam, with some kind of first-mover advantage. But with ZaloPay, there’s already an immense market of users in Zalo alone;  these people use the platform for intimate kinds of conversations and for e-commerce activities or peer-to-peer payments. ZaloPay just needs to be tightly integrated with Zalo to have access to that huge user base.

“The other thing is that we really want to create compelling stories for our merchants. How do we acquire merchants in a way that we provide interesting capabilities for them that’s not based on cash?,” shares Mark, adding that interesting business models have come out of this concept overtime, where ZaloPay was able to solve problems for merchants that maybe they couldn’t solve in the normal scheme of things.

“We want to grow our intelligence this way — by using the data to allow us to really have a compelling case as to why consumers should take yet another e-wallet player, Zalo specifically, over the others.”

At present, ZaloPay lets users link a payment card to make peer-to-peer payments, pay via NFC, QR codes, purchase products and services online, mobile top ups, and pay their utility bills such as electricity, water and telecommunication service.