How AWS is powering Vietnam’s financial industry transformation

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh directed the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) to evaluate commercial banks’ proposals for implementing Basel III international banking standards, particularly in relation to the country’s planned global financial centres. Several of Vietnam’s leading banks have already completed their Basel III programmes, signalling the industry’s commitment to higher standards of capital adequacy and risk management.

Eric Yeo, country general manager, Amazon Web Services Vietnam

The growing uptake of Basel III guidelines among Vietnam’s financial institutions demonstrates a sophisticated approach that goes beyond simply strengthening capital reserves. Banks are now taking a long-term view of capital utilisation, implementing frameworks that help maintain adequate capital during growth periods while providing essential buffers during crises. This evolution in banking practices represents Vietnam’s growing alignment with international standards and regulations, and also underscores the nation’s ambition to become a significant player in global financial services.

As we draw close to mid-2025, my conversations with customers increasingly focus on what role technology, cloud, and generative AI play in helping banks meet these higher standards and to ensure compliance with new guidelines as early as possible.

Cloud computing offers banks the scalability and agility needed to manage compute capacity on demand, while efficiently handling the integration and processing of vast amounts of data from multiple sources for risk calculations and reporting.

Unlike on-premises environments, cloud can scale and adapt to dynamic market demands, enabling real-time risk assessments with greater flexibility. Additionally, we’re witnessing the transformative impact of GenAI in banking operations, particularly in helping risk managers and technology teams interpret new regulations and assess their implications for data management, analytics, and risk computation workflows.

Gen AI’s capabilities are especially valuable in Basel III compliance efforts. When faced with thousands of pages of regulatory documents, Gen AI can efficiently summarise relevant regulations, analyse their impact on existing data architecture, and guide developers in making necessary coding changes. This technology helps developers understand the context and also identifies specific framework components requiring updates while validating code against Basel III repositories.

To successfully implement Basel III and other similar standards, banks must maintain substantial capital reserves and accept higher provisioning to mitigate operational risks. While large banks with strong financial foundations are adapting more readily, smaller institutions face significant pressure. Beyond capital requirements, a major hurdle for Vietnam’s banking system is the need for accurate, reliable, and up-to-date data – an area where the country still faces notable gaps.

It is not just in financial risk management, like Basel III, that is resonating in my executive conversations. We are cognisant as well of how AWS and the financial services industry share a common commitment to operational risk management. The industry now has greater awareness of the need for availability and reliability of their services.

Furthermore, the security of systems and customer data, paired with service continuity, especially for critical economic functions, forms the foundation of resiliency in Vietnam’s financial services industry. Supporting this goal, AWS has announced plans to launch a new AWS Local Zone in Hanoi. This will enable customers to run core AWS services locally while seamlessly connecting to workloads in AWS Regions, maintaining the same elasticity, pay-as-you-go model, application programming interfaces (APIs), and tool sets they rely on.

There is also a constant challenge across heavily regulated industries like financial services striking the important balance between security and resilience, against the organisation’s ability to deliver innovation, drive cost optimisation, launch features/services that deliver rich customer experiences, and overall, deliver quantifiable business value.

Our customers are showing the way for how the industry should meet higher and higher standards of resiliency, security, and stability of financial services. In November 2024, VIB successfully migrated its website to the cloud, advancing its cloud-first and AI-first strategies.

This move ensures support for millions of simultaneous customers with fast response times, even during traffic spikes, through AWS’s high network bandwidth and automatic resource allocation. As a result, VIB optimises performance, enhances scalability, and drives innovation through AI while strengthening operational resilience.

Operational resilience, like security, is a shared responsibility between AWS and our customers. AWS maintains the availability of infrastructure and services, the essential building blocks for customer applications, while ensuring preparedness for events that could impact our infrastructure.

Customers, meanwhile, are responsible for managing the resilience of their data and workloads, including architecture decisions, disaster recovery planning, high availability implementation, and backup strategies.

Our edge locations in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City help customers achieve up to 30 per cent improvement for first byte latency while providing secure, reliable connectivity to the global AWS network. Beyond infrastructure, AWS supports customers in meeting their resilience objectives through comprehensive training and guidance on frameworks like AWS Well-Architected best practices.

Across the world, thousands of financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, and Experian are using AWS to redefine their future, by building their own applications for mission-critical workloads such as mobile banking, core systems, regulatory reporting, and capital markets trading.

In Vietnam, major banks, insurers, and financial services providers rely on AWS for their mission-critical workloads, backed by advanced security capabilities, compliance certifications, and operational best practices like the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

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