Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping Vietnam’s financial industry, from securities trading to data analysis. At Vietcap’s innovation office in Ho Chi Minh City, AI systems now help analysts cut report-processing time by up to 80%. Across the market, brokerages such as Techcom Securities, SSI, VNDIRECT, and Vietcap are racing to build their own platforms or partner with fintech startups like DATX and Finbox, which apply machine learning to generate stock predictions and trading signals.
Yet, the promise of AI-driven finance faces constraints: limited historical data — Vietnam’s stock market only has about 300 months of performance records — strict regulations against automated trading, and a shortage of AI engineers trained in finance. “Becoming an AI engineer is already hard,” said Pham Cao Cuong, Head of Data Science at Vietcap. “Becoming one in finance is even harder.”
Despite the challenges, experts expect AI to become a core advantage for financial firms by 2030, as the number of listed companies and retail investors expands. As Cuong noted, “People think AI is all about coding, but most of our work is collecting, cleaning, and training data — that’s where the real intelligence begins.”
This article is a condensed and translated summary (original in Vietnamese, VN) of a feature published in the November 2023 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek Vietnam.