Innovative Vietnamese digital bank Cake by VPBank has won the Asian Banking & Finance Awards for the Best Core Banking System Initiative - Vietnam at the ABF Retail Banking Awards 2022. The Awards recognise the best of the best in the banking and finance industry across Asia and attracted more than 150 entries this year.

Mr 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, enabling us to launch exciting new digital products and features for our customers, and remain 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 card”.

Launched 19 months ago, Cake soon realised there was a gap in the market for a full service digital bank aimed at Vietnam’s young, digitally-savvy population. Subsequently, Cake made the decision to replace its original core banking system with Mambu’s cloud-native SaaS platform in mid-2022 in order 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 record for the region.

Cake 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 at August 2022.

Mr Pham 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. All products and services offered by Cake are fully licensed by the State Bank of Vietnam through VPBank. It offers 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 that is integrated with a ride-hailing application, an emerging form of embedded finance in the world which 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 this 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.