Digital spinoff for modern customers
Vietnam
Home to 98 million people, 70% of whom are under the age of 35, Vietnam’s population is young, dynamic and quick to adopt innovative tech. The country’s Gen Z population is expected to grow to 15 million by 2025 - a substantial number of future tech-native banking customers who prefer to do everything on the go.
Customer-driven banking
Vietnam’s young and digitally adept demographic is driving the demand for digitised products and services, in entertainment, retail, and in banking. Despite the enormous amount of phone registrations (128 million), Vietnamese financial institutions are yet to offer a compelling end to end digital banking solution. This is where one of Vietnam’s leading commercial banks, Maritime Bank (MSB), saw an opportunity and launched TNEX.
TNEX, MSB’s speedboat, is targeting a population of about 40 million by providing users with a vast ecosystem of merchants, alongside banking services and products. The team at TNEX believes that banking is the means, not an end goal in itself and have designed their application accordingly - simplifying life by removing the need to use multiple apps. Driven by customer behaviour, TNEX was built to support the end-user’s lifestyle, needs, wants and dreams.
People have to bank daily, not to bank but to acquire goods and pay their bills. Nobody does banking for banking’s sake, especially not the younger generations.
Core - robust yet invisible
For the foundation of its end to end digital-only banking experience, TNEX needed a banking platform that could scale infinitely while operating entirely seamlessly. The team did not want to limit their scope and worry about infrastructure by purchasing a traditional core banking system or building one in-house. Instead, they wanted to devote their efforts towards solving real-life customer problems.
At the beginning of 2020, TNEX made the decision to take a cloud-native approach and evaluated potential partners based on their market presence, pricing model and the core functionality. Mambu was selected because, like TNEX, we believe that no single vendor can innovate on every front as well as a healthy ecosystem of vendors, each dedicated to one thing. Adopting a composable architecture enabled TNEX to pick out best-for-purpose tools and services and avoid vendor lock-in.
Mambu is a veteran in a young market, and offered a robust, cloud-native solution that operates seamlessly removing all pain points.
Having selected Mambu’s API-first composable banking platform deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Vietnam’s first digital-only bank was born in the cloud. Over the next months TNEX was built using data science, AI, customer-first design principles and cloud-native technology.
TNEX was rolled out in phases - in August 2020, the digital bank launched TNEX Merchant to create its ecosystem, then, starting November 2020, consumers are able to download its full banking offering. After this initial launch, TNEX will also roll out a series of credit products for merchants.
Culture rooted in data science
From the start TNEX aimed to operate like a technology company, not a bank. MSB invested heavily in culture and in tech, and hired psychologists and data scientists instead of bankers. Emphasising the importance of network and ownership even further, TNEX adopted a modified Spotify-like model with a people-driven and autonomous way of working. This enables them to make data-driven decisions and build truly customer-centric products and services.
TNEX’s offering combines gametech, messaging, socials, and a full-merchant ecosystem with a complete payments network. The company invested heavily into the graphics of its application, turning TNEX’s banking experience into a highly personalised virtual world.
