Vietnam's Maritime Bank partners with Backbase to drive unified, customer-centric digital modernization

Maritime Commercial Joint Stock Bank (MSB) has made a strategic investment in the Backbase Engagement Banking Platform, with local implementation support from Backbase’s partner, SmartOSC, a leading digital enabler.

This milestone marks a pivotal step in the Hanoi-headquartered private bank’s journey toward customer-centric modernization, advancing its digital factory, and delivering seamless experiences that drive financial innovation in Vietnam.

As one of the pioneering banks implementing digital transformation in the market, MSB aims to become a bank with a leading digital platform that offers best customer service experience.

By adopting the Backbase Engagement Banking Platform, MSB is unifying its in-house applications onto a best-of-suite anchor platform, Backbase said in a release on Friday.

This strategic shift enables the bank's digital factory to deliver a seamless, end-to-end digital banking experience by building on the platform - from onboarding and daily transactions to product holding - enhancing customer engagement, simplifying product bundling, accelerating unique feature development, and reducing cost-to-serve for MSB’s 5.4 million retail and 100,000 enterprise customers, it added.

MSB’s goal is for the platform to enable an omnichannel, frictionless banking journey that elevates the modern customer experience.

“Through this platform, we will unify, modernize, and launch our retail and business banking channels on a single platform within the next 12 months, achieving the speed, agility, and control needed to scale differentiated customer experiences,” said Nguyen Hoang Linh, CEO of MSB.

This investment aims to lower MSB's cost-income ratio by 8%, reduce cost-to-serve by 30% through frictionless onboarding-to-usage journeys, and increase its CSAT (customer satisfaction) scores to 93 for retail and 85 for enterprise banking.

MSB estimates a 30% increase in active digital customers and a 20-40% increase per year in digital acquisition by delivering end-to-end digitalized experiences after launching the platform.

Riddhi Dutta, regional vice president, Asia of Backbase, commented: “Rather than uproot and restart, the ‘adopt and build’ approach enables MSB to reinvent their existing channels and apps, upskill their digital factory, and empower in-house talent to unlock new efficiencies and innovation.”

SmartOSC will play a key role in localizing the Backbase platform to meet MSB’s specific needs, ensuring seamless alignment with local expectations and regulatory requirements.

Backbase is a privately funded fintech company, founded in 2003 in Amsterdam (global headquarters), with regional offices in Singapore (APAC headquarters), Atlanta (Americas headquarters), and operations in Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Latin America, and the UK.

With 18 years in operation, SmartOSC is an industry-leading digital transformation agency of 1000+ experts worldwide. The company delivers top-tier solutions and caters to the unique requirements of banks and financial institutions worldwide by leveraging the latest technologies.