Electronic phone recharging app OnOnPay received investment of $800,000 from the Malaysian Government’s Gobi Partners Fund on November 18.

The investment’s targets are improvements in infrastructure, services and technology. “We will develop other services besides phone recharging services,” Mr. Nguyen Hoa Binh, Head of Marketing at OnOnPay, told VET. “The investment from Gobi Partners Fund will be used to develop OnOnPay’s services for customers not having a bank account.”

“Only 30 per cent of Vietnam’s 90 million people have a bank account to pay for services, and we will focus on the remaining 70 per cent,” said Mr. Bui Sy Phong, CEO and Founder of OnOnPay. “By contrast, most people have a smartphone and internet connection.”

With this investment, OnOnPay wishes to develop in Southeast Asia, with target markets including Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. Its plans are supported by Gobi Partners.

OnOnPay was established in 2015 with previous investment from Captii Ventures and has been growing steadily, Mr. Phong said.

Last March, the M-Service JSC, which owns the MoMo brand, received investment of $28 million from Standard Chartered Private Equity and Goldman Sachs; the largest received by a Vietnamese fintech company to date. While being lower, the recent OnOnPay investment is further evidence of the attraction the local fintech sector holds for foreign investors.

Other Vietnamese fintech companies have also received investment recently, according to the Topica Founder Institute. The sector is third in capital attraction, following e-commerce and advertising.

There are more than 30 fintech companies in Vietnam, which is quite modest. It is growing, however, and companies are developing new services in capital and data management.

Each fintech company has different services and modes of operation. For instance, MoMo turns mobile phones into electronic wallets for customers to transfer money to each other, while Payoo pays daily bills, VTPay calculates and pays taxes, Loanvi provides a platform for peer loans between users, Cash2vn allows customers to transfer remittances to Vietnam, and Money Lover manages spending.

VN Economic Times