NAB Innovation Centre Vietnam wins Asian Technology Excellence Awards 2025

The company empowers businesses and customers with real-time, secure payment transactions.

NAB Innovation Centre Vietnam has been recognised for its role to help transform payments by delivering faster, safer, and customer-centric experiences through its Pay by Bank solution with the Asian Technology Excellence Award.

The Pay by Bank platform allows users to authorise payments directly from their online bank accounts, eliminating the need to input card or account details with its automated features.

In 2019, National Australia Bank (NAB), one of Australia’s largest financial institutions, chose Vietnam to establish its first innovation centre outside Australia. What began as a pilot project with just 10 engineers has grown into a thriving global capability centre with over 2,200 employees across Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

“NAB Innovation Centre Vietnam has been recognised at the Asian Technology Excellence Awards 2025 for its development of NAB’s Pay by Bank, an innovative solution that enables direct, real-time bank payments, enhancing security, speed, and transparency for both businesses and consumers. Its scalability and future-focused design also highlight its dynamism, positioning NAB’s Pay by Bank as a transformative force in shaping the next era of digital commerce and banking,” as noted by Asian Business Review.

What sets the Pay by Bank solution apart is how it was built, through close collaboration between NAB’s Australian product teams and the technologists at NAB Innovation Centre Vietnam. From ideation to implementation, both teams worked hand-in-hand to ensure the solution was not only technically robust but also deeply aligned with customer needs. Vietnamese engineers contributed significantly to the architecture, user experience, and integration layers, bringing agility and innovation to every stage of development.

“Pay by Bank is a testament to how Vietnamese engineers and Australian product teams can co-create transformative solutions that serve millions of NAB’s customers”, Hanh Tran, General Director, NAB Innovation Centre Vietnam, said.

For businesses, Pay by Bank delivers significant operational benefits, including cost efficiency, real-time payments that improve cash flow and forecasting, automated payment reconciliations, transparency in cancellations, improved customer loyalty, fraud reduction, and fast implementation. Meanwhile, customers benefit from real-time fund transfers, simplified checkout processes, convenient processes, greater control over regular payments, and enhanced security measures such as two-factor authentication and biometrics.

Notably, Amazon has already integrated Pay by Bank into its Australian checkout platform, enabling customers to make transactions by paying directly from their bank accounts without disclosing card details. This partnership illustrates how innovation enhances convenience for consumers whilst providing businesses with a cost-efficient and instant payment solution.

Pay by Bank was developed as part of NAB’s broader strategy to modernise financial services through digital innovation and customer-centric design. The goal was to provide business customers with smarter, safer, and simpler payment tools, whilst also enhancing the experience for individual users.

NAB Innovation Centre Vietnam was honoured with the Vietnam Technology Excellence Award for E-Commerce - Banking in the Asian Technology Excellence Awards 2025, underscoring its pivotal role in NAB’s ambition to be the most customer-centric company across Australia and New Zealand in delivering innovative digital experiences for its 10 million customers.

Over the past six years, NAB Innovation Centre Vietnam has become deeply embedded in NAB’s technology ecosystem, contributing to critical initiatives in mobile banking, everyday transactions, artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud infrastructure. Today, the centre stands as an integral part of NAB’s workforce, delivering best experiences for its customers globally.

This remarkable growth is not just a story of scale, but of customer impact.

“The award reflects NAB Vietnam’s strong commitment to customer centricity, engineering excellence, innovation and global collaboration and to build solutions that matter for customers,” said Hanh Tran, General Director of NAB Innovation Centre Vietnam.

The Asian Technology Excellence Awards is presented by Asian Business Review. To view the full list of winners, click here. If you want to join the 2026 awards programme and be acclaimed for your company's outstanding retail initiatives, please contact Julie Anne Nunez-Difuntorum at +65 3158 1386 ext 242 or [email protected].