Vietnamese firms win top honours at ASEAN Digital Awards

Three Vietnamese companies won two gold awards and one bronze award at the 2026 ASEAN Digital Awards (ADAs). The ceremony was held in Hanoi on January 15 on the sidelines of the sixth ASEAN Digital Ministers’ Meeting. Among the winners, MedCAT Nexus, developed by MedCAT Company, received the gold award in the digital startup category.

MedCAT receive the Gold Award. Photo: MST

MedCAT Nexus is an AI application platform that combines small language modelling and vision-language modelling developed in-house, enabling high-accuracy reading, extraction, and restructuring of unstructured data.

The solution has been deployed in various fields such as healthcare, banking, insurance, and public administration, contributing to shortening processing time, reducing operating costs, and improving service quality.

The second Vietnamese gold award winner was VCB Tablet from Vietnam Foreign Trade Commercial Bank (Vietcombank), honoured in the digital innovation category.

VCB Tablet is a platform that enables the transformation of traditional branch counters into paperless digital transaction counters, supporting individual and corporate customers in performing various transactions in the digital environment. This contributes to enhancing customer experience, increasing management efficiency, and promoting digital transformation in the finance and banking sector.

VCB Tablet was honoured in the digital innovation category. Photo: MST

In the public sector category, Elcom was awarded the bronze prize for its Elcom ITS intelligent transportation ecosystem, a solution that applies digital technology in managing, operating, and optimising transportation infrastructure.

Elcom ITS is developed as a platform for large-scale real-time data processing, AI, in-depth analytics combined with IoT, and has been deployed on numerous roads, highways, and traffic control centres.

This also marks the first time a Vietnamese entry has won in the public sector category, one of the ASEAN Digital Awards’ most rigorously assessed segments.

The awards are held as ASEAN countries accelerate efforts to build a regional digital community, with a focus on innovation, digital economic growth, and inclusive digital development.

This year’s ADAs attracted hundreds of submissions from across the bloc, with entries assessed through three stages: national selection, an online regional preliminary round, and an in-person final round.

Vietnam fielded five products and technology solutions across all six award categories, the highest level of participation in the past three editions, reflecting the growing depth and maturity of the domestic innovation ecosystem.

Established in 2012, the ASEAN Digital Awards are held annually to recognise outstanding digital software, products, and technology solutions in the region. Entries are assessed against strict criteria covering innovation, implementation effectiveness, scalability, and social impact.

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