Quatrro wants bigger presence in Vietnam

Raman Roy

In your company’s business strategy, Vietnam is a focus market in the Asia Pacific region. Specifically, what does this mean?

Vietnam’s economy is recovering strongly, with the young population generating a big demand for banking services. The country’s banking sector remains underdeveloped and is closely connected with the world’s banking sector. These factors offer big opportunities for us.

One of our focus markets in the Asia Pacific region is Vietnam. For the last two years, we have done extensive market research by meeting a number of banks and financial services institutions in Vietnam.

Our proposition of providing card processing services and associated managed services has resonated with several banks that are keen to increase their card portfolios. Our value proposition of providing a managed service with a “Pay As You Go” pricing will enable banks to minimise the infrastructure costs required for setting up a card business, while they focus on marketing, product development, and customer engagement.

This is a trend that is emerging as a best practice in mature markets. Additionally, it enables banks to convert capital expenditure (Capex) into operational expenditure (Opex). This is particularly appealing to the small- and medium-sized Vietnamese banks that have small debit, credit, and pre-paid card portfolios. It does not cost justify the investment and on-going operating costs required for the hardware infrastructure and card management system.

How has Quatrro translated these potential advantages into a reality in Vietnam?

We have co-operated with Vietnam’s FPT Telecom to deploy our solutions in Vietnam. FPT Telecom can provide us with a high-quality telecom infrastructure. Quatrro Processing Services Pte Ltd., an entity of Quatrro Global Services Pvt. Ltd, has set up two data centres at FPT locations in Vietnam, with one in Ho Chi Minh City and the other in Hanoi so as to provide in-country processing, disaster recovery, and business continuity. The FPT data centres in Vietnam are tier-3 with ISO 27001 certification. Quatrro Processing Services among the first processors globally to be certified for PCI-DSS v 3.0.

How will you make your services different from other rivals in Vietnam?

I would say that Quatrro is now the first and only foreign firm to place data centres in Vietnam, which can help banks back up their data without outsourcing. Meanwhile, all the banks in Vietnam are trying to develop under international standards and they are issuing a small number of debit cards of 25,000-100,000 or less than 500,000 per bank. However, most of them are of a small and medium size, with high operational costs used to maintain the existence of these cards. This will be costly to banks.

As such, we want to establish partnerships with local banks and financial institutions to reduce their operational costs through our own solutions. Normally, it would take six or nine months for a Vietnamese bank to deploy a product in the market. But the time is only eight or 10 days with the help of our solutions.

Vietnam is strongly restructuring its banking system. How important is it to Quatrro’s performance here?

This will give us a great opportunity because under the restructuring, banks will have to revise their investment portfolios and market performance. We can co-operate with them to solve these challenges in the most effective manner.

In Vietnam, Quatrro Processing Services can act as an IT service provider helping banks to process their cards portfolio through expert knowledge, strategic relationships, and cost-effective solutions/services. Through its state-of-the-art technology, it will partner with local banks to manage the day to day card operations, complying with the standards and requirements of the payments card industry.