Vo Thi Hong Diem, PhD, a lecturer of RMIT University, said AI-based apps have become indispensable in the finance and banking sector.

Smart chatbots and virtual assistants are capable of understanding and resolving customers’ queries, providing suitable financial services, automating tasks, detecting frauds, assessing credit and providing automated customer support solutions.

The integration of AI into the finance sector has helped the sector grow well recently. A study of the World Economic Forum in 2020 found that 85 percent of financial institutions were putting AI technology into operation, while 77 percent of senior executives predicted that AI will be a high or very high priority of enterprises in the next two years.

Diem pointed out that large commercial banks in Vietnam have been injecting money into researching and deploying AI in their operations.

TPBank has integrated its face recognition technology into LiveBank, its auto bank service, improving customers’ security and convenience. VietinBank is using FaceID recognition kiosks to identify customers and forward their requests to consultancy officers, and at the same time act as efficient assistants.

Other banks, including Techcombank, VIB, ACB, VPBank, VietABank and NamA Bank, have used AI for many different tasks, including chatbots that interact with customers; asset management, security and fraud prevention. Also, they help analyze customers’ behaviors of withdrawing money in high season.

“The integration of AI technology into the banking sector not only helps optimize operation costs, but also strengthens support to customers, and enables efficient process automation,” Diem said. 

The technology has ioutstanding advantages in revolutionizing data management, grasping customers’ behaviors and promoting sustainable relations with customers, according to Diem.

However, she pointed out that most Vietnamese banks use traditional rule-based AI, which predominantly handles routine requests and supports simple financial transactions.

While citing the outstanding advantages of generative AI in comparison with traditional AI, Diem noted that the application of generative AI in Vietnam remains modest.

She pointed out the challenges from integrating generative AI on a large scale in the banking sector in Vietnam.

Vietnam is lacking a firm AI development ecosystem and reasonable support policies, so, it is still fledgling in AI compared with other Asian countries.

Also, the high cost of AI apps and advanced machine learning, plus the lack of skilled workers, all are hindering the progress. The current AI workforce supply can satisfy only 10 percent of recruitment demand. While generative AI needs a high volume of high-quality data, the strict regulations on data security and privacy are limiting the volume of usable data.

Le My