Listen and subscribe to “Vietnam Innovators” in English: Vietcetera Podcast | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | YouTube.
Listen and subscribe to “Vietnam Innovators” in Vietnamese: Vietcetera Podcast | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | YouTube.
“Innovate.Execute.Win,” is the statement that welcomes you when visiting Pranav Seth’s LinkedIn page.
Pranav is an engineer at heart. He’s passionate about improving human life using behavioral science, art, and technology. He’s been building digital growth engines to augment the growth of the franchise in Vietnam at Techcombank as the Chief Digital Officer.
Bringing two solid decades of experience building customer-obsessed digital businesses and executing large-scale strategic transformations, Pranav took the challenge of embracing how “the change of pace is exhilarating” and “digitalization of the economy is increasing” in Vietnam. To him, Vietnam’s ability to innovate is much higher than any country in the region.
In this episode of Vietnam Innovators, Pranav talked about why it matters for the banking sector to adopt digitalization and also shared a couple of exciting advancements Techcombank is preparing for its users.
Why are banks active in digitalization?
More than just making existing data digital, digitalization embraces the ability of digital technology to collect data, establish trends and make better business decisions. And that’s something banks like Techcombank are highly adopting.
Banking has responded better than many other traditional industries globally as it was always driven by tech for the last 40 years or so. But there is zero room for complacency. The need to realize the full benefits of available technologies and acknowledge emerging technology’s unknowns is critical for the bank sector.
When asked why digitalization is of the essence to banks, Pranav mentioned a couple of reasons:
Serving the digital customer
In a country like Vietnam, a predominantly young population relies heavily on technology. It is crucial to provide a digital solution for their banking requirements. It’s about consuming the adoption of new tech. The consumer adoption timeframes of new technologies have come down from 60-50 years, like telephones to less than five years now, Pranav explained. “If all customer experiences in their day-to-day life are based on their digital experiences — simple, instant, hopefully transparent — and the banking system is not delivering that, you are leaving yourself for someone else to deliver banking in a different manner.” At the end of the day, banks need to undergo digitalization to serve digital customers.
New technology leads to new business models and allows to do social good
Over the years, technology has become more advanced and readily available for banks to leverage. Before all these advancements, banks could only acquire new customers manually and face-to-face on one platform, their branch. Conversely, for a customer to get a loan approved, enormous time is consumed doing background checks, validations, and whatnot. But using technology, there’s almost an endless possibility to scale.
With digitalization, “there is an ability to serve customers, that earlier in the old operating model, the banks could not serve a large part of the society that did not have the means.” With these technologies, banks now have the scale and operating cost to serve those customers. The regulators and the government are aware of that, which is why they are changing the regulations to make that happen. “Regulations are changing to provide more societal good.”
Banks are part of the economy building, and Pranav’s mission at Techcombank is to be at the forefront of the digitalization of banks.
How is Techcombank using tech?
For many years, compared to other banks, Techcombank has differentiated its banking business by offering specific solutions, groups of solutions, not by every single product. The bank invests a lot in market research and customer understanding to build solutions for each segment, for each customer.
With the digital transformation, Techcombank enhances the leading position by providing personalized solutions on a faster processor and larger scale, better at meeting the changing demand. Just before 2021 ended, Techcombank officially launched a new digital banking application Techcombank Mobile powered by the world’s leading digital platform provider, Backbase.
Considered the gateway to a digital Techcombank, the mobile app was grounded on the research of over three thousand customers taking into consideration their inputs, all to provide simple and personalized experiences. From acquiring, transacting, and achieving financial goals, everything becomes possible with just a tap.
Techcombank Mobile focuses on personal banking with advanced technology, strengthened security, and a user-friendly interface design that creates a seamless experience for the customer with security, simplicity, convenience, and comprehensive experience driven by AI, data, and customer-centric philosophy. They also launched their retail banking, SME banking, digital platforms, and apps. Pranav highlighted how the Vietnamese engineering talent wowed him for hitting many such achievements in just a year and a half.
Moreover, Techcombank has partnered with AWS in its cloud journey to deploy a hybrid data lake on the cloud with kappa architecture. This will help enhance customer experience and improve product offerings. Productivity has also experienced an uplift.
Techcombank continues to improve its services and how they interact with its customers — all having technology at the center. Here are the key features of the app:
- For any new customer, they can open an account via eKYC in less than five minutes for NTB customers. Techcombank Mobile empowered customers via a cashless solution.
- Also, new customers can quickly get a credit card and account bundle in less than five minutes for NTB (new to bank) and one minute for ETB (existing to bank) customers thanks to the instant and paperless Credit card application, or apply for a loan instantly from credit card installment.
- The app lets you experience a comprehensive payment integration solution, including installment, QR code payments (with personalized QR), person-to-person (P2P) and person-to-merchant (P2M) payments, automatic renewal bill payment registration, and foreign currency diversified transactions, and more.
- As for financial well-being, customers can get a loan approved through credit card installment and lending applications. They can also manage inflow and outflow transactions via Personal Financial Management. There’s Goal Saving, Fund Trading, and investment once customer link their account to the Techcombank Securities account.
Techcombank has committed to the vision of changing banking to change lives as they continue improving its services and how they interact with its customers — all having technology at the center.
If you share the same vision and are passionate about the customer, digital, data, and technology – they are looking for more people to join them in their journey towards digitalization.
Watch the full episode below.