Vietnam’s Cake wins Asian Banking & Finance Award for Best Core Banking System Initiative

The awards recognise the best of the best in the banking and finance industry across Asia and attracted more than 150 entries this year.

Nguyen Huu Quang, CEO of Cake by VPBank, said: “We are incredibly proud of being named winner of the Best Core Banking System Initiative at the Asian Banking & Finance Awards for 2022, and would like to thank our core banking partner Mambu for its ongoing support and dedication to our business."

"We selected Mambu’s cloud core-banking platform as it provides many innovative and versatile solutions in the market, contributing to launching exciting new digital products and features for our customers and us remaining at the forefront of Vietnam’s emerging digital banking industry.

"Thanks to innovative core banking, creative go-to-market strategy and dedicated staff, Cake is the first digital bank in Vietnam that provides a full range of personal financial services, including payment, saving, lending, micro investment and credit cards.”

Launched 19 months ago, Cake soon realised a gap in the market for a full-service digital bank aimed at Vietnam’s young, digitally-savvy population.

Subsequently, Cake decided to replace its original core banking system with Mambu’s cloud-native SaaS platform in mid-2022 to enable rapid growth and offer the kinds of digital banking services its customers expected.

The core replacement project was completed in just 74 days. A new recordCake empowers clients to manage their daily expenses through free-of-charge digital banking while offering them out-and-out personalisation, attracting nearly 2 million users as of August 2022.

Phạm Quang Minh, General Manager Vietnam for Mambu, said: “Mambu is immensely proud of our partnership with Cake, which we see as a very like-minded organisation. Like Mambu, Cake is committed to enhancing access to financial services and strives to make banking a better experience for all. We congratulate Cake on this well-deserved achievement.”

Cake is a collaboration between BeFinancial (a member of Be Group - the organisation behind Vietnam’s ‘Be’ ride-hailing app) - and VPBank, one of Vietnam’s leading banks.

The State Bank of Vietnam fully licenses all products and services offered by Cake through VPBank. It provides a range of banking products and services, with its tech-enabled solutions allowing new customers to open a bank account in just two minutes via a smartphone.

Cake is the first digital bank in Vietnam integrated with a ride-hailing application, an emerging form of embedded finance in the world that first appeared in Vietnam in the last 2-3 years.

With the scale of the digital economy in Vietnam forecast to reach US$50 billion by 2025, the potential of embedded finance is vast, and the market will become vibrant when more players like Cake join the game.

The modern core banking approach, and new business model, have helped Cake achieve remarkable results in terms of customer growth, financial services diversity and transaction size mentioned above.

Cake’s story also shows that cooperation between businesses and banks is to seize new business opportunities. Banks should define a digital transformation strategy, decide on the business model, and build an open ecosystem for financial services.

Banks should also choose which third-party products to bring onto their platforms and sales channels and which products to integrate into the third-party platform.