What will make the Vietnam International Financial Center different from the rest of the world?

Speaking on the Vietnam Television, Ms. Ha My TRAN, Founder and Chair of Danang Fintech Lab DFL24, and Prof. Duc Pham Hi shared their perspectives on the development of the Vietnam International Financial Center. They emphasized that technology can serve as a strategic lever, enabling Vietnam to narrow the gap with more established global financial hubs and create new competitive advantages in the digital economy.

Singapore, Dubai, and London were each built on distinct strengths. Vietnam’s opportunity, therefore, is not to recreate a model that has already succeeded elsewhere, but to identify its own advantages and translate them into new capabilities for the future of finance.
Vietnam has a young and adaptable workforce potential in fintech, digital assets, tokenization, green finance, and cross-border financial services.

Yet potential becomes an advantage only when it is transformed into systems that can operate in practice.

According to Ms. Ha My Tran, three foundations should be prioritized:

• A next-generation regulatory sandbox: Beyond providing businesses with a controlled environment to test new products, a modern sandbox should help regulators assess transaction flows, user behaviour, and risk scenarios before new policies are introduced at scale.
• Secure and future-ready data infrastructure: As financial assets are increasingly stored and transferred digitally, security is becoming a foundation of financial trust. Vietnam should proactively develop long-term protection capabilities, including quantum-resistant technologies.
• An AI-native financial centre: AI can become part of the centre’s operating architecture, supporting transaction monitoring, anomaly detection, risk assessment, and data-driven policymaking.

However, technology creates speed, while institutions create trust.

An international financial centre cannot be built through incentives, physical infrastructure, or landmark buildings alone. It requires an enabling institutional framework-open enough to support experimentation, yet robust enough to protect investors, ensure accountability, and manage systemic risk.
As one of the pioneering organizations contributing to the VIFC in Da Nang, DFL24 is developing controlled testing environments, connecting international experts, strengthening talent, and advancing practical applications across fintech, blockchain, and digital assets.

This is not simply the journey of building an organization. It is part of a much larger question: What position will Vietnam build within the global digital financial architecture of the coming decades?

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