Building Vietnam's International Financial Centre: Infrastructure, Trust, and the Case for Getting It Right
Interview with Pham Nguyen Thanh Tam, VP of Product and Technology, Hydra X
This is the full interview transcript. An edited version was published in Tuổi Trẻ, one of Vietnam’s largest daily newspapers, on 13 March 2026
Vietnam has set its sights on becoming an international financial centre, even as the region already hosts established hubs like Singapore and Hong Kong. In your view, what are the greatest opportunities and challenges Vietnam faces in this pursuit?
Vietnam’s greatest opportunity in building an international financial centre is, at the same time, its greatest challenge. Vietnam is entering this race precisely when several major trends – AI, digital infrastructure, cross-border payments, green finance, and digital assets – are maturing simultaneously. That gives it the advantage of a late mover: the ability to design new models from the ground up.
But that advantage only holds if Vietnam is clear about which parts of the system must conform to global standards, and which parts can genuinely differentiate. An international financial centre can be flexible in its model, but it must be firm on core fundamentals: clear rules, consistent oversight, effective dispute resolution, and the capacity to earn investor trust.
Vietnam can take its own path – but that path must still connect with the world on the things that matter: capital flows, data standards, reporting frameworks, payment infrastructure, custody, and market institutions. The goal should not be differentiation for its own sake, but filling the right gaps in the regional architecture – the ones where Vietnam has a genuine advantage.
Choose the right role, go in the right direction, and Vietnam can arrive later without finishing last.
You have emphasised “institutional trust” as the foundation of a financial centre. How does that trust need to manifest concretely to convince international investors and financial institutions?
Institutional trust does not appear when risk disappears. It appears when people can see enough layers of verification to believe that risk is being managed. The memory of COVID-19 is instructive: many people chose vaccination not because their concerns had vanished, but because they could see the chain of trials, independent review, and safety monitoring behind it. Finance works the same way. Investors do not wait for zero risk; they commit when they see a system that is credible, transparent, and accountable.
For an international financial centre, that trust is built across three layers: clear rules of the game, transparent operations, and effective enforcement. The legal framework must be unambiguous, oversight must be consistent, procedures must be predictable, and reporting obligations must be transparent enough for the market to verify.
The most critical layer is enforcement. One way to put it: the judge is the best salesperson. Incentives may attract initial attention, but it is the first few disputes – the processing time, the quality of rulings, the enforceability of outcomes – that shape what the market actually believes. Institutional trust is not a promise. It is an operating track record built over time.
Looking at the current state of Vietnam’s financial system, what are the structural bottlenecks that stand in the way of a competitive financial centre?
Vietnam does not lack ambition, and it does not lack market demand. The central bottleneck is translating that ambition into an operational framework clear enough for cross-border financial activity.
The core challenge is building a system that is firm at its centre and flexible at its edges. The centre does not need to be perfect from day one, but it must be precisely defined on a set of non-negotiables: transparent rules, consistent supervision, clear accountability, enforcement capability, and effective dispute resolution. The edges are where the system can accommodate multiple lanes of activity, multiple participants, and varying risk profiles – without needing a single mechanism for everything. What matters is that every lane runs on the same underlying operating system.
Vietnam should not aim to perfect everything at once. What matters more is absolute consistency on core foundations, then deliberate expansion from there. Done this way, Vietnam does not just open a market. It builds one worth trusting.
Many of the world’s major financial centres took decades – even centuries – to form. Can a late-mover like Vietnam leapfrog that process, and if so, what does that require?
This is a moment made for leapfrogging. The AI era has demonstrated that many processes can be redesigned to reach the same outcome in a fraction of the time. But the lesson is not that AI is the solution to building a financial centre – it is that some parts of the system can be rebuilt very quickly, while the conditions that generate trust cannot be shortcut.
Vietnam can leapfrog how things are implemented. It cannot skip the conditions that make trust possible.
Think of an airport: check-in can be fully digitalised to move passengers faster, but air traffic control and safety standards cannot be compressed. A financial centre is no different. Vietnam can leapfrog in process design, digital infrastructure, risk-tiered routing, and controlled experimentation. But it cannot take shortcuts on law, supervision, enforcement, dispute resolution, and systemic safety.
Leapfrogging is not about cutting the foundation. It is about reaching the destination faster with a smarter architecture.
How do you see the prospects for Vietnam’s financial centre over the next 10 to 20 years, and what are the most important steps to take now?
Over the next 10 to 20 years, Vietnam’s trajectory will depend on whether it can create a credibly accelerating path. In finance, speed is not incidental – it is a competitive capability. But speed is only sustainable when the rules are clear, the infrastructure is sound, and the market believes the system can move fast while still managing risk.
Think of VIFC as a motorway interchange. It does not need to cover every direction from day one, but it must open the right arterial routes, keep them running smoothly, and operate at pace. When the right flows connect, volume builds quickly and draws an ecosystem around it.
The most important thing right now is not expansion at any cost. It is designing an environment that the world can work within: clear rules, high standards, credible enforcement, and sufficient processing speed. A successful financial centre does not need to start broad. It needs to start right – and fast enough to build momentum.
Some argue that financial centres attract large capital flows but that this capital does not necessarily flow into the real economy. How should Vietnam design its financial centre to attract international capital while also supporting domestic business growth?
This is a genuine design risk worth taking seriously. A financial centre can generate substantial capital on paper, but if the product structure and operational boundaries are not designed correctly, that capital can end up cycling through secondary financial transactions rather than reaching production, logistics, or innovation in domestic companies.
That is why the initial core product set must be chosen carefully: narrow, easy to supervise, with clear economic foundations – prioritising transactions directly linked to trade and business activity. Import and export payments, invoice financing, freight settlement, and FX hedging based on verified contracts. Once that base layer is operating reliably, the centre can expand gradually into controlled investment flows.
There is one more dimension worth adding: if international capital is to genuinely reach domestic businesses, the system must think not only about how capital enters, but how it exits. Investors will not commit for the long term without visible exit routes – typically IPO or M&A. Exit mechanisms are not the end of a startup or growth company’s story; they are the mechanism for recycling capital and redistributing talent into the next cycle of development.
VIFC should not simply be a place that attracts capital. It should be a place that routes capital into real economic activity, and returns it to the economy through credible exit channels. That is how a financial centre both attracts international flows and genuinely supports Vietnamese companies to grow.
Alongside the opportunity to attract capital, financial centre development carries risks – hot money flows, market volatility. What risk management mechanisms does Vietnam need to prepare?
The question is not whether risk exists, but whether it is being bounded, monitored, and addressed in time. An international financial centre that wants to develop sustainably must accept that opening a market always carries the possibility of volatility – but that volatility must sit within a governance architecture that can contain it.
The starting point is designing operational boundaries clearly across three layers: which participants are authorised, which products are permitted, and which capital and data flows must be reported and traced under what conditions. This must be accompanied by risk-tiered structures, position limits, reporting obligations, automated alerts, and a real-time supervisory dashboard. Opening fast without commensurate supervisory capacity creates a system prone to rapid expansion followed by sudden contraction.
Beyond market risk, operational resilience needs attention: system failures, cybersecurity, data integrity, confidence crises, and dispute response mechanisms. For new activities, sandboxes should serve as a buffer layer – experimentation with conditions and stop rules – before formal scale-up is permitted.
Financial centres are anchored to specific cities. What conditions does Ho Chi Minh City need – in terms of infrastructure, talent, and business environment – to genuinely become an international financial centre?
A useful frame comes from technology. A good smartphone needs more than powerful hardware – it needs hardware that is well-designed and reliably operational: battery life, durability, ease of use. But hardware alone is not enough; it also needs a smooth operating system, strong connectivity, security, and a trustworthy application ecosystem. An international financial centre works the same way.
Ho Chi Minh City needs both hardware and software. The hardware is transport, airport access, office infrastructure, and physical connectivity – and what matters is not just having these things, but having them well-designed, reliably operational, and capable of serving fast and continuously. The software is what is invisible but equally decisive: digital infrastructure, data systems, payment networks, international connectivity, clear rules of engagement, efficient procedures, professional services, an open living environment, and the ability to operate at international standards.
An IFC is not a story about towers and capital flows. It is a story about a city that has both the hardware to support operations and the software maturity that makes the world want to work there.
Hydra X is a configurable digital markets infrastructure platform built for regulated capital markets. The company provides full-stack coverage across tokenisation, custody, distribution, exchange, OMS, and RFQ/OTC trading.
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