This year marks the first anniversary of the establishment of KBTG Vietnam Company Limited (June 28, 2022), or KBTG Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh City, which is KBank's third-largest technology base in Asia, behind KBTG in Thailand and K-Tech in Shenzhen, China. 

From the outset, Kasikorn Business Technology Group assigned two Thai managing directors, Mr.Thanussak Thanyasiri (Khun-Un), the Managing Director, KBTG Vietnam, and Mr.Pakawat Maneechaemsai (Khun-Porsche), the Head of IT Strategy & Operations, KBTG Vietnam, along with Scout, to pioneer, examine, and research the Vietnamese market in various dimensions, up until Tech Talents carried on expanding the team while offering office space. The 12-month period is said to be at KBTG Vietnam, the new route itself, and raising instantly right until the official office on the 21st floor of the Friendship Tower in Ho Chi Minh City. KBTG Vietnam Ho Chi Minh now employs 100 employees; 97 of them are Vietnamese and three are Thai.

KBTG Vietnam as a Tech Hub dedicated to recruiting Tech Talents

In actuality, KBTG Vietnam's major aim is to develop software, generate financial innovations, and develop new technologies in response to banking procedures, but to satisfy these demands, ‘there must be individuals who are Tech Talents first.’

While Thailand has a significant shortage of Tech Talents, institutions in Vietnam can annually provide STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) workers for the employment market, with approximately 10,000 graduates. To get ready for the SEA tier market, KBTG Vietnam, which will be a significant Tech Hub in the region, will have to recruit IT-quality professionals or STEM experts in Vietnam to support the expansion of Thai Bank's digital services in the country. 

KBTG Vietnam's next goal is to hire 500 employees by 2025, and staff members will be critical in driving the tech firm to become a Top SEA Tech Company in Southeast Asia, while KBank will ascend to the top 20 digital banks in the region (Regional Digital Bank).

No Name Brand to Become a Regional Tech Firm

Ruangroj Poonpol - Khun-Krating, the Group Chairman KBTG

One way to kill the mood from listening to what Mr.Ruangroj Poonpol (Khun-Krating), the Group Chairman of KBTG, mentioned when he visited the KPMG Vietnam office at the Friendship Tower, is that the brand 'KBTG' is unknown. It is unknown just how far someone misunderstood applying for a job at KBTG by declaring "they intended to work with KPMG." KPMG is a big four accounting firm with a fundamentally different business model from KBTG.

Mr.Thanussak Thanyasiri, the Managing Director of KBTG, and Mr.Jarung Kiatsupapong, the Vice Chairman of KBTG, are responsible for promoting the KBTG Vietnam branding and driving the company's technology or financial services business to a regional level through Tech Talents.

Thanussak Thanyasiri, Managing Director, KBTG Vietnam

“They prefer to collaborate rather than work from home. It may be claimed that the new generation frequently collaborates as a group. As a result, we've generated a large number of hybrid workers when we made a job transferable.Bringing individuals here to learn from K-Tech in China, which has the know-how side of AI and Blockchain.”

Mr.Thanussak highlights bringing technology from a developed source to apply with Tech Talents in Vietnam, as well as KBTG Vietnam's flagship product, namely the collaboration and development of the 'K PLUS Vietnam' mobile application, the Thai Bank's flagship service, developed by K PLUS in Thailand, which has more than 600,000 downloads in Vietnam. The company's next target is to have more than 1.3 million users by the end of the year.

Overall, executives from both KBank and KBTG are convinced that "people development" will lead businesses to Sustain, which is the principle of the 3S strategy, Speed, Scale, and Sustain, with the use of the Playbook that Khun-Krating uses in Thailand to accelerate business growth and which has already produced results. That is, develop Tech Talents and offer training sessions. Create courses in collaboration with premier universities to share knowledge and improve the abilities of tech talent in those countries. Getting skilled employees in various sectors not only helps firms satisfy their goals, but it also helps them better understand the demands of local people. While encouraging learning creates opportunities for teamwork and regional expansion, it also functions as an attraction for employees to stay with the firm for a longer period of time.

Mr.Thanussak emphasizes in Sustain that we must first make 'people' sustainable so that organizations might become sustainable.  We follow four strategies through KBTG: first, we design our own working strategies; second, we create opportunities for work and learning at the regional level; third, we use ONE KTBG in collaboration; and finally, we enable new generation teams to join the community in education and skill enhancement programs.

Then, Mr.Thanussak extends Sustain to the practice of KBTG, which is essential in addition to human growth. It is also necessary to impart information or practice.

“Because the company must first expand at the regional level before expanding at the global level, everything else must expand in tandem. We want to make it Sustainable at the IT level. To begin, we must build a large number of individuals in order to produce jobs. Second, there is a wealth of banking knowledge in Thailand that we are attempting to impart here in order to make people appreciate Thai scale. We want to protect both people and knowledge, thus we've opted for a practice from Thailand that can be applied here.”

Khun-Krating's Playbook was used by the KBTG Vietnam team in Ho Chi Minh City to attract Tech Talents, and the company applied this Playbook in Hanoi as well.

"Hanoi is Vietnam's leading source of banking, as well as people with banking knowledge." There are people who know business and IT, which is a rare group, together with developers and another Top University, so we went to open a branch there to attract Tech Talents to work with us because the Vietnamese who live in the north are also in the south, and they rarely migrate," Mr. Jarung explained.

Mr. Thanussak continued, "Because the top 20 state banks are established there, we need to have an office first, and the office in Hanoi is still in the early stages." "We are new here, so no one knows who we are. We need to give them permission to enter us. Treat them perfectly, and they will spread the word of mouth in the same way that Ho Chi Minh City did."

Additional observations in case KBTG Vietnam develops another branch in Hanoi

The Techsauce crew discovered that KBTG Vietnam had built a new branch in Hanoi. The following are some observations: 

• Given that Vietnam has over 100 banking brands, KBTG has only been in the market for a year and is still relatively unknown. Another office in Hanoi will expand access to Tech Talents in the new zone, and Hanoi is also a source of international banking brand integration. As a result, KBTG Vietnam uses Hanoi as another avenue to discover individuals to raise recognition of the KBTG brand and KBank products, offering Vietnamese people the opportunity to learn about and connect with the Thai brand.

• Based on research on behavior and engagement with the new generation of Vietnamese employees, KBTG discovered that Vietnamese people frequently work in their home city or neighborhood, where immigrants are not as common as Thais. The official opening of offices in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi provides an opportunity to work in a hybrid capacity to assist people residing in different cities, compared to KBTG in Thailand, which could operate totally from home.

• While KBTG in Thailand allows employees to work from anywhere, a point that is compatible with new generation working habits, new Vietnamese generations like to meet and discuss face-to-face and brainstorm together in the office. The office serves as a focal point for the team's activities. It can also be utilized as a case study of a corporate culture that is both similar and dissimilar to that of Thailand.