The digital transformation race is important in the banking sector. In particular, the rapid change in consumer behaviour during the Covid-19 pandemic prompted banks to undertake digital transformation to reach their customers.

Nguyen Toan Thang, secretary general at Vietnam Banks’ Association, said banks were developing the retail segment based on digital technology, along with accelerating the digital transformation process. Mobile banking and internet banking products and services are growing. Catching up with that trend, banks are promoting investment in the use of new and modern technologies such as non-contact technology and biometric applications in customer authentication, as well as integration of different services on the same application, remote transactions, and virtual assistants.

Financial and banking expert Can Van Luc noticed said banks lacked linkages, causing a great waste of resources. In charge of digital banking of Military Bank (MB), Vu Thanh Trung acknowledged this fact. Regarding the implementation of electronic customer identification (eKYC) solution, Trung said all banks have been racing to deploy this solution and a lot of money has been spent on this race, instead of using it to support customers. According to banks, they need a solution to use each other's identification results to open accounts for customers. "In the future, customers will only need to open one account for many different banks, as many European countries did," said Dinh Van Chien, Deputy General Director of TPBank.

Sharing this point of view, Pham Cong Quynh Lan, Deputy General Director of VietinBank, said eKYC was one of the proofs of the digital transformation for the whole society, not just the banking industry, so there must be a focal point to implement this solution.

Pham Anh Tuan, a member of the Board of Directors of Vietcombank, stated: “In the meetings with the State Bank, we suggested a common standard for the eKYC, avoiding the case as before that the Government issued standards for cards when banks had completed this activity already.” According to Tuan, currently, no eKYC solution can "connect" to each other, all data collected by company A’s eKYC cannot be used or exploited for company B. Thus, it is necessary to have an eKYC alliance for banks to share information with each other.

"Thirst" personnel for digital transformation

In addition to the waste of resources due to the lack of linkages and sharing, the digital transformation of banks faces a serious shortage of staff. Tuan said there were not many digital transformation personnel in the banking sector, with most of them running from bank to bank. Although IT teams in banks are not few, the number of people with sufficient qualifications and knowledge related to digital transformation is limited. According to Tuan, banks need to strengthen training and self-training for their systems to supplement resources, and look for more domestic and foreign resources. At Vietcombank, for example, the director and deputy general manager roles of the digital bank are held by foreigners.

Tuan also worried banks competing with each other to attract employees will put themselves in a difficult position, because this pushes salaries higher and higher.

In that fierce competition, Nguyen Hai Long, Deputy General Director of Agribank, said Agribank was the weakest unit because it is a 100% State-owned bank, which is controlled in terms of salary. “Agribank loses about 10 IT staff every year, only two new staff were recruited in 2019. This year, the bank has tried its best to recruit but faced many difficulties because the starting salary is only VND5-7 million, much lower than the general salary level in this field,” stated Long.

Leaders of many other banks shared their misery when personnel for digital transformation moved to a new unit. Lan said the competition for digital transformation personnel not only took place between banks but also between banks and fintech companies - competitors who pay a lot of money to attract good staff.

Explaining the scarcity of digital transformation staff, leaders of banks said the digital transformation trend has taken place in recent years, leading to an increase in demand for human resources in this field, while resources have not yet met this demand. According to Trung, looking back on the past three years, there are a lot of job positions that have never been in the market before, even positions bankers have never imagined, such as customer experience analyst and data analyst.

Therefore, expert Can Van Luc said the Ministry of Education and Training should have training programmes on digital transformation personnel soon, specifically skills in data analysis, customer experience analysis and risk management in digital environments. Currently, several universities have fintech faculty such as Banking University of HCM City and National Economics University, but it still needs to be strengthened. Besides, there should be a contributing role of banks to bring practical knowledge into training programmes.