VIB Card Milestones: Top Market Player After 30 Years

Vietnam International Bank (VIB) is marking its 30th anniversary with significant strides in the domestic credit card market, solidifying its position as a key player. The bank is on track to issue nearly 1.5 million cards by the end of 2025, with transaction volumes projected to exceed $5 billion, a substantial increase from approximately 92,000 credit cards in 2018. The utilization of these cards has grown even faster than their issuance. Total spending via VIB cards is expected to surge from around $360 million in 2018 to over $5 billion in 2025, representing a roughly 17-fold increase within seven years. This trajectory places VIB among the top 5 issuers of international credit cards and top 3 in the market for card spending. This growth indicates not only an expanding customer base but also increased frequent usage by existing cardholders for daily transactions, with the average spending per VIB card nearly double the market average. In 2025, the bank's card spending volume saw a 100% year-on-year increase, earning VIB the Payment Volume Growth award from Visa. In the first six months of this year, its approximately 1.5 million cards generated over $2.6 billion in spending. A cornerstone of VIB's success lies in its strategic approach to card development, tailored to the diverse needs and lifestyles of its customers. Moving beyond simple tier-based differentiation, VIB has developed a portfolio of cards focused on specific spending behaviors and needs, such as online shopping, travel, automotive, cashback, or points accumulation. This strategy ensures card benefits are closely aligned with customers' regular expenditures, providing compelling reasons for frequent use. Alongside product specialization, technology has become a crucial development axis for VIB. The bank has progressively digitalized the card usage journey and expanded personalization capabilities for customers. Users can not only choose benefits aligned with their spending needs but also customize features, card designs, and proactively select their funding sources. Each layer of innovation enhances the flexibility of the user experience and empowers customers with more decision-making power. As the range of choices expands, VIB continues to focus on enabling card benefits to adapt to individual customer needs. This is particularly relevant as each person's financial journey, income level, and spending priorities are not static over time. Traditionally, credit card tiers are determined by criteria such as credit limits, financial profiles, and bank-stipulated conditions. While this standardizes benefits, it often makes customers dependent on the bank's predefined criteria. However, individual financial journeys are increasingly diverse, especially for younger generations with flexible work styles, income generation methods, and spending priorities. Max Card, developed by VIB, offers greater flexibility. Through membership packages, customers can proactively choose or upgrade benefits based on their needs at any given time without needing to change their card or open a new product. The key differentiator lies in this personalized tiering approach, shifting from the bank solely determining a customer's tier to allowing users to actively select the benefit level that suits their needs. With customers having multiple simultaneous needs and evolving priorities, the challenge is to expand usage value without burdening them with managing numerous cards. When each need is tied to a separate card line, users might need to hold multiple cards to optimize benefits—one for cashback, one for travel, another for international spending. While this approach expands incentives, it increases the number of products to track and manage. VIB One Card is designed to consolidate multiple needs onto a single product. Customers can continue using the same card even as their spending habits, financial capacity, or benefit priority levels change over time. The bank has built this adaptability around three value pillars: 'Sufficient Needs - Sufficient Privileges - Sufficient Financial Lifecycle.' The goal is to ensure the card meets diverse current needs and remains suitable as customers progress through different financial stages. Within 20 days of its launch, 15,000 VIB One Cards were opened. To maintain this level of flexibility at scale, VIB integrates data, AI, and its years of technological investment. The underlying system enables the bank to personalize benefits while customers primarily manage them through a single product. Broadly speaking, VIB's card development journey has evolved from specialized product lines catering to specific needs to expanding choices in features, design, funding sources, and benefit tiers. With One Card, this development path takes another step forward, offering a product that can continuously adjust to user needs rather than being fixed from the moment it's issued. VIB is thus pursuing deeper personalization while maintaining a simple user experience. Instead of adding more and more products, the bank focuses on expanding the value within a single card to better align with customers' evolving circumstances over time. VIB's advancements in the card market are a testament to the bank's 30-year journey of innovation and strong growth. With customers at its core, the bank continuously seeks new approaches—from needs-based specialization and digitalizing the journey to empowering choice and developing adaptable cards. Each product generation represents a new step forward in customer experience. Through these efforts, VIB is steadily building and demonstrating its position among leading commercial joint-stock banks, contributing to the promotion of digital payments in Vietnam and making practical contributions to the nation. In 2025, the bank continues its presence among major contributors with VND 2,700 billion paid into the State Budget. Building on this foundation...