The power of partnership: modernising financial services in Vietnam

Financial institutions today are under pressure to modernise on two fronts at once: the localised, customer-facing digital experience, and the payments infrastructure that sits behind it all. Getting both right calls for collaboration and is what inspired the partnership between Stanchion Payments, a global payments technology provider, and Finative, a speciality technology integrator in Vietnam. 

Nowhere is the modernisation pressure more acute than in Vietnam. The market continues to lead the region in the early adoption of innovative payment technologies. Solutions such as tokenisation for digital wallets and Click to Pay are now being introduced as the next evolution of online payments. For issuers, it makes meeting scheme mandates for new features an urgent priority and this is on top of the systems they already run. 

Two halves of one transformation journey 

Finative has vast experience of the Vietnamese banking system and financial services sector. As a technology and engineering partner, it has helped institutions modernise digital platforms and customer experiences through a combination of domain expertise, modern engineering practice and AI capability. 

Stanchion Payments brings a complementary specialisation: its modular technology, Payment Fabric™, enabling banks to add new issuing capabilities on top of the infrastructure that issuers already run, without re-platforming or high-risk replacement. 

Between them, the two organisations can support a bank across a wider span of its transformation than either could alone, addressing it from the customer-facing digital channel all the way through to the payments backbone behind it. 

A relationship grounded in a common problem 

The partnership for Vietnam grew out of a shared observation that financial institutions need to move faster, but legacy systems and the difficulty of modernising them safely, often stand in the way. Both organisations describe the relationship as strategic and collaborative, built on a dual commitment to making the evolution easier for banks, not harder. 

The fit is reciprocal. Finative’s transformation and engineering delivery capability extends Stanchion Payments’ reach into broader banking modernisation programmes. It gives it a safe pair of hands for localised implementation and provides support in the Vietnamese market. Stanchion Payments’ depth in payments, in turn, gives Finative a credible answer for the payments layer of the programmes it leads. 

“Banks rarely modernise payments in isolation, it happens as part of a much bigger transformation story. Finative brings exactly that broader context: expert banking transformation and engineering delivery capability. Together, we can support a customer across the full journey, from the digital experience through to the payments infrastructure underneath it with the same commitment to reducing complexity and risk that defines how we work,” says Norman Frankel, Chief Growth Officer at Stanchion Payments. 

Click to Pay: the first proof point 

An immediate opportunity shows what that looks like in practice. Before cardholders can use Click to Pay, their cards must first be enrolled and tokenised within the scheme’s token vault. Stanchion Payments helps card issuers accelerate this process by automating the secure loading of card data into the scheme’s token vaults, removing manual processes and simplifying the onboarding of cards to Click to Pay. Finative brings the local delivery and integration capability that puts capabilities like this into a bank’s own environment and channels. 

Where the partnership goes from here 

The partnership points to a wide range of future opportunities: payment modernisation, digital banking transformation, open banking, cloud migration, AI-enabled financial services, and integration modernisation among them. 

For banks, fintechs and payment providers weighing up how to modernise without unnecessary cost, disruption or risk, the combination of Finative’s transformation delivery together with Stanchion Payments offering provides a more complete answer than either capability on its own. It is an end-to-end proposition spanning customer experience, digital channels, core integration and payments infrastructure. 

Stanchion Payments helps financial institutions modernise, integrate, secure and operate payment infrastructure with confidence. By combining deep payments expertise with flexible technology and specialist services, the customer journey is vastly improved. 

About Stanchion Payments 

Stanchion Payments is a global payments technology company with more than 25 years of experience helping financial institutions modernise, integrate, secure and optimise their payment environments. Through its proprietary Payment Fabric™ and deep payments expertise, Stanchion enables organisations to introduce modern capabilities across existing infrastructure without the cost, disruption and risk of wholesale replacement. 

About Finative 

Finative is a trusted technology partner for digital enterprises, dedicated to architecting and building the digital ecosystems that modern banking demands. Through platform-certified teams spanning Asia, Europe and North America, Finative partners with banks and fintechs across digital banking implementation, maintenance and support, and AI and data, helping them deliver faster and more competitive financial products from build through to sustained growth.