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- Vietnam’s fintech sector shifts from apps to infrastructure
- The AI talent wars get agentic
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Hello reader,
I’m writing this newsletter update on the way back from Thailand, where my flag football team competed in a tournament. As with any group trip, we’ve ended up with a lot of debts to settle among ourselves – from accommodation deposits to taxi fees – and the inevitable “who paid for this?” moments.
Most of us are based in Vietnam. So instead of scrambling to offload our remaining baht, we simply square up in Vietnamese dong via QR transfers: a few taps, a screenshot, then done. What now feels frictionless and almost boringly obvious would have been far less seamless just a few years ago.
That shift says a lot about how ubiquitous digital payments have become in the country and how crowded the battlefield currently is. Retail payments are no longer frontier territory but a red ocean.
E-wallet giant MoMo helped usher Vietnam into a cashless consumer era. The next phase of fintech may look very different, however.
That’s at least according to Le Hong Hang and Huy Pham, the guest writers of today’s featured article. They think the real opportunity lies in moving away from consumer wallets and toward the SMEs and B2B infrastructure that power the country’s economy – the financial plumbing.
If you want to understand where Vietnam’s next US$100 billion in fintech value might actually accrue, this one’s worth your time.
Peter Cowan, engagement editor
Top Story
Vietnam’s fintech sector enters a post-MoMo reality
Photo credit: MoMo
This article, from a pair of RMIT Vietnam academics, explores the past, present, and future of fintech in the country. They argue that while MoMo showed Vietnamese consumers could go digital finance at scale, the next chapter will be written by building the financial rails beneath the surface.
As retail payments become commoditized and super apps mature, the real opportunity is shifting toward SME infrastructure, cross-border settlement, and embedded finance. In other words: from polish to plumbing.
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