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| Damian Hickey, regional director for Southeast Asia at The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change |
The plan to formally establish an international financial centre (IFC) in both Ho Chi Minh City and Danang city was not only a landmark decision but a clear signal of intent. It reflects Vietnam’s strong commitment to greater financial openness, deeper integration with the global financial landscape and building an enabling environment for financial innovation and sustainability.
With the newly issued action plan, which sets clear targets to achieve key reforms by the end of 2025, Vietnam is fast-tracking its IFC development. Experience from both established and emerging IFCs has shown that strategic partnerships are critical to broadening their financial ecosystem. This offers valuable lessons for Vietnam in its implementation phase.
Collaborating with leading IFCs and organisations will help Vietnam enhance its global positioning and integrate more effectively into global capital markets. Strategic alliances also allow Vietnam to learn from best practices and avoid reinventing the wheel. Furthermore, such partnerships will serve as a powerful signal to institutional investors, indicating that Vietnam is serious about creating a transparent, efficient, and globally competitive financial environment.
Drawing on our close understanding of Vietnam’s IFC roadmap and lessons learned from advising other IFCs globally, I would like to highlight how Vietnam can foster opportunities for collaboration that generate mutual value, strengthen the IFC’s competitiveness, and position Vietnam as an emerging financial hub.
Sectoral priorities
The government has already taken important steps to lay the groundwork for strong and effective international partnerships through the provisions outlined in the plans. By committing to align Vietnam’s IFC with advanced international standards, the policy sends a clear signal of openness to integrate into global financial markets.
In parallel, the introduction of special mechanisms for public–private partnerships in infrastructure, flexible land and real estate regulations, together with attractive mechanisms for strategic investors creates the conditions to attract world-class partners for large-scale, strategic projects. These measures have demonstrated the institutional flexibility needed to mobilise private capital and a willingness to collaborate with global partners to create an infrastructure-ready IFC.
The next phase will require translating this vision into measurable outcomes by identifying sectoral priorities where strategic partnerships can generate the greatest impact on the financial ecosystem and the IFC’s business environment.
Building on our experience advising leading IFCs, we have identified five such priorities: legal infrastructure and dispute resolution, capital markets, fintech, sustainable finance, and talent development.
In legal infrastructure and dispute resolution, investors often view legal certainty and familiar dispute resolution mechanisms as a prerequisite for investing in new financial centres. As Vietnam’s IFC aims to integrate common law elements into its existing civil law system and establish specialised courts and an international arbitration centre, partnering with IFCs that have successfully achieved these reforms would offer some proven models to follow.
Firstly, capacity building for Vietnam’s judiciary should be prioritised through targeted partnership for training and study exchange programs.
Modernising the IFC’s digital legal infrastructure is also critical to ensuring efficiency and transparency. Partnerships with legal technology companies can help integrate AI-powered tools into the court and arbitration system.
In capital market deepening and integration, as Vietnam advances its IFC ambitions and pursues an upgrade to emerging market status, deepening and integrating its capital markets will be pivotal for enabling efficient, large-scale capital flows. To accelerate market sophistication and strengthen investor confidence, Vietnam should forge strategic partnerships with global exchanges to co-develop specialised platforms and instruments that enhance liquidity, broaden product diversity, and enable cross-border interoperability.
For Vietnam, recent reforms towards emerging market classification and the IFC plan present an opportunity to position itself as a regional asset and wealth management hub. Establishing alliances with established and emerging IFCs, coupled with proactive investment roadshows targeting global institutional investors, can accelerate market depth and broaden investor participation. However, external partnerships must be matched by domestic market modernisation.
Regarding fostering fintech development, Vietnam already benefits from a vibrant fintech ecosystem, underpinned by strong consumer adoption in payments, e-wallets, and peer-to-peer lending. However, to position its IFC as a true regional fintech hub, Vietnam must move beyond domestic market expansion and actively embed itself in the cross-border fintech value chain.
This will require targeted partnerships with leading technology-driven IFCs, so that Vietnam can scale up the impact more collectively, instead of moving forward through fragmented, individual efforts.
To reinforce these bilateral partnerships, Vietnam should also seek to integrate into global fintech networks such as the Global Financial Innovation Network. Comprising more than 90 financial regulators and related organisations worldwide, the network facilitates cross-border collaboration, regulatory harmonisation, and joint testing of innovative products.
Beyond regulatory connectivity, Vietnam’s IFCs should create direct bridges between startups and established financial institutions to accelerate commercial adoption.
Finally, Vietnam should establish a flagship annual or regional fintech forum, co-branded with established IFC partners. This forum would serve as both a high-profile deal-making platform and a showcase for Vietnam’s innovation capabilities, while providing a regular convening mechanism for regulators, investors, and innovators to discuss the market trends and collaborative opportunities.
In sustainable finance, to put sustainable finance at the core of Vietnam’s IFC, and to support the country’s net-zero ambition, green instruments must move from a peripheral product set to a foundational offering.
One of the fastest ways to build market credibility and execution capacity is to partner with recognised standard-setting organisations, such as International Capital Market Association and Climate Bond Initiative, so that issuers, reviewers, and investors can transact on familiar definitions, taxonomies, and verification practices.
Based on experience from other IFCs, these are the most common areas of collaboration including enhancing domestic capacity for verification and securing global accreditation, co-developing innovative ESG instruments and unlocking untapped green capital, and integrating technology-enabled sustainable finance solutions.
Clear and efficient
To future-proof the IFC, Vietnam should also embed technology-driven issuance frameworks that enhance transparency and efficiency.
These three pillars should also be complemented by a proactive strategy to showcase Vietnam’s leadership in green finance through high-profile regional ESG investment forums and targeted international roadshows. By partnering with leading IFCs and global standard setters to host these events, Vietnam can project credibility, attract institutional investors seeking high-impact opportunities in emerging markets, and build enduring partnerships that reinforce the IFC’s reputation as a regional gateway for sustainable capital.
Meanwhile, talent development is one of the most critical pillars in building a competitive financial ecosystem.
Through our advisory work with several IFCs, a recurring challenge, especially for emerging hubs, is the limited access to skilled finance professionals. Thus, it is critical to both attract foreign talents and nurture its local base.
Each IFC has adopted different strategies to address this gap. Vietnam should develop a targeted partnership strategy tailored to IFC’s need. Collaboration with leading professional standard associations can help introduce internationally recognised training programmes aligned with market needs, especially in emerging areas for Vietnam such as IFRS compliance, investing in environmental, social, and governance criteria, or build up local capacities in financial analysis and asset management.
At the same time, fostering strategic linkages between local universities and prestigious global institutions can expand exchange programmes, joint curriculum, and faculty development initiatives. Finally, creating a vocational training alliance of financial institutions, academia, and professional bodies will ensure industry-driven skillset development and a pipeline of job-ready graduates.
Developing local talent goes beyond finance and digital skills. It’s about developing the soft skills, including an entrepreneurial mindset, and business skills that would bring Vietnam talents on par with their international counterparts.
