According to the State Bank of Vietnam, only 20 percent of Vietnam's population holds bank accounts, while the country's labor force is over 50 million. At the end of 2011 just 14 percent of transactions were non-cash. On the other hand, young Internet-savvy consumers are a fast-growing group in Vietnam, which is creating demand for new online and mobile banking services such as those included in IBM's recently announced portfolio of MobileFirst solutions.

To tap this tremendous growth potential in retail banking, SHB has been expanding rapidly, growing to 5,000 employees at 317 branches, including two in Laos and Cambodia. In addition to its traditional full-service banking experience for individual and corporate customers, the bank is looking to launch new online and mobile-enabled services. As part of this initiative, the bank also designed a special offer branded 'S-Double Account' -- offering a variety of new online services including payroll services, credit card insurance, loan applications and overdraft protection to clients.

"SHB places special emphasis on the role of technology in transforming operations and enabling growth, especially after the important acquisition of Habubank in 2012. Our rapid growth in recent years caused an exponential increase in the data we operate with," said Nguyen Van Le, chief executive officer of SHB. "We realized that if we want to launch innovative services to new client segments, while at the same time adhering to compliance regulations, we have to be able to manage much more data-intensive transactions and analyze that data in real time to improve customer service. The IT infrastructure we adopted in 2010 from other IT companies was imposing limits in the way we wanted to work with our data."

As part of SHB's business strategy "Competition by Differentiation", making the best use of investment opportunities, IBM provided SHB with a solution composed of IBM Power Systems servers, IBM System Storage and IBM Tivoli software. The solution helped SHB streamline its IT infrastructure management, consolidate data flows and provided the bank with a single view of clients and data. By automating several pieces of the financial process the bank was able to launch its "S-Double Account," together with some new online and mobile-based services, such as loan application, appointment booking, and bill payment.

"Our Smarter Computing portfolio is about solutions designed for the data, working in a software-defined environment, and doing so in an open and collaborative way," says Nguyen Kim Hoa, Country Manager, System and Technology Group, IBM Vietnam. "We help companies and governments around the world and in Vietnam to adopt smarter computing systems which use intelligence to drive operational efficiencies and optimize workloads, concurrently reducing costs. The solution implemented by SHB helped them introduce new innovative online and mobile banking services to new client segments."