Mobile Money in need of boost

Many solutions to promote the development of Mobile Money in Vietnam were proposed at the “Promoting the Development of Mobile Money in Vietnam” conference held by the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) and the Ministry of Information and Communications (MoIC) on May 11.

After more than four months of pilot implementation, new Mobile Money services had more than 1.1 million customers as of the end of March; quite a low number given that there are 123 million mobile phone subscriptions in the country.

After being permitted to conduct a pilot, VNPT (Vinaphone), MobiFone, and Viettel have been working to provide Mobile Money services to customers, especially those in rural areas, since the end of November.

Although positive results have been seen, challenges remain. Ms. Pham Minh Tu, Deputy Director of MobiFone Digital Service, said that although it is the first company to receive a pilot license for Mobile Money in Vietnam, it has been behind the world for 20 years. The perfect time to introduce and promote Mobile Money has long passed.

Similarly, Mr. Nguyen Van Tan, Deputy General Director of Vinaphone, believes that late implementation has resulted in slow development. “Mobile Money’s security standards are still unclear,” he said. “If there is a system of national security standards, that would be the basis for network operators to use to deploy and invest in the system.”

To resolve such problems, Mr. Tan proposed a number of measures, such as not needing mobile phone subscribers to identify themselves again, not needing them to meet the requirement of having continuously used the service for at least three months, allowing piloting enterprises to expand cooperation with other enterprises outside of authorized telecommunications service providers, and allowing customers to use Mobile Money services to transfer and receive money.