Vietnam banks look to tap into big data

At a recent conference in Hanoi, Anh said that digital data was becoming a new resource and big data was playing an important role in the banking and finance sectors.

The conference, titled “Big data for banking and financial industry,” was organised by the Banking Academy of Vietnam.

At the workshop, participants focused on big data technology from a variety of perspectives. They discussed the latest technology and ways for banks and financial institutions to optimise the application of big data into information systems.

Through the discussion, experts shared hopes that they could identify the opportunities and challenges of big data to improve the productivity, quality and efficiency of financial and banking operations.

The fourth industrial revolution is taking place across the globe and having a strong impact on all aspects of socio-economic life, according to the experts. It promises to create more opportunities and an impetus for the country development of each nation or organisation.

The fourth industrial revolution with Internet of Things, automation and artificial intelligence has brought digital data to the centre of the business world.

Digital data had become a very important resource from which businesses can generate revenue and provide new application ecosystems, services and digital products, said Anh.

“Therefore, digital data will grow and become an important industry in the fourth industrial revolution,” he added.

At the workshop, the deputy governor also said that the specificity of banking is creating a huge amount of data from structured data such as transaction histories and customer records to unstructured data such as customer activities on Internet and mobile banking application.

“Applying big data to exploit the data will bring significant competitive advantages and efficiency for the banking and finance sectors,” he added.

In addition, Pham Anh Tuan, director of Vietcombank’s tech modernisation department, said that data in the banking system and those collected from the outside include many types. These include structured data, semi-structured data, and unstructured data.

"The current banking data is unstructured, which meets all big data standards in volume, movement and persity," Tuan emphasised.

The representative of Vietcombank also said that when banks as well as financial institutions identify data with great value, they must consider data assets of the bank. “In other words, data must be treated like any bank assets, which have to be taken care of and ensured on asset security.”