The experts werespeaking at a conference on intelligent data management in banking andfinance, held by the Banking Strategy Institute and the Banking Academythis week.
DeputyGovernor of the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) Nguyen Kim Anh said the bankingsector had been proactive in accessing research, building policiesand facilitating the application of data in management and developingproducts and services over the past time, which created a driving force fordigital transformation in the banking sector.
An SBVsurvey last month showed that half of local banks have built a centraliseddata warehouse.
About 50 percentof banks have applied data analysis to optimise operating processes, increasingoperational efficiency and managing risks.
Althoughcommercial banks in Vietnam have recognised data management as a basis forinnovative activities, some surveys showed that nearly half of the banks had noaction plan on data management.
Datacleaning had gone unnoticed from the data makers, said chief economist of theBank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BIDV) Can Van Luc.
Banking datawas still largely dispersed, the amount of junk information was quitelarge and data quality was still low, he said.
The samesituation also happened for other financial companies and the constructionof new data warehouses was at the beginning stage without the connection ofdifferent data sources, he added.
Banks in Vietnamare quite open in sharing data with fintech and many other serviceproviders such as electricity, water and telecommunicationsthrough application programming interface (API) portals.
However,leaders of many joint-stock commercial banks said sharing data with banks wasstill quite risky because there is no legal corridor related to this issue.
Le Anh Dung,Deputy Director of the SBV’s Payment Department, said he expected the Ministryof Information and Communications would soon submit to the Government a decreeon electronic identification, and the Ministry of Public Security would sooncomplete the development of a decree to protect personal data so thatbanks had a facility to exploit and protect data.
Dung alsosuggested the Government study, consider and enforce the law on user dataprotection and the law on user data privacy protection to create a clearand synchronous legal framework for data management for the whole economy.
Agreeing, Lucproposed developing appropriate management policies and mechanisms to promotedata management and analysis.
TheGovernment and businesses must see data as a precious resource, which needs asafe and effective management and exploitation process, and speed up thebuilding of national databases, he noted./.