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Hà Nội needs to combine green growth with urban development

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Bảy Mẫu Lake and Thống Nhất Park in Hai Bà Trưng District, Hà Nội. — VNA/ Photo Thành Đạt

HÀ NỘI — The capital Hà Nội is focusing on urban development towards green and sustainable growth and building a smart and modern city.

According to the Hà Nội Construction Department, the city has paid attention to implementing environmental protection and improvement toward green and sustainable urban development.

The city has also invested in and completed the environment monitoring system in polluted areas and publicised monitoring results in the media to improve the capacity and efficiency of management, forecasting and control of environmental pollution.

Accordingly, the city has put 10 automatic air monitoring stations, one mobile monitoring vehicle, one wastewater and air monitoring station at the Nam Sơn Waste Treatment Complex, and six automatic water surface monitoring stations.

The station data is transmitted to management centres for monitoring and processing.

The work of undergrounding the electric and communication cables, planting trees, and embellishing the street pavement have been done synchronously. Thanks to that, the face of the city is getting greener, cleaner and more beautiful.

Besides, the development of public green outdoor spaces has been gradually meeting the needs of urban residents. From 2015-to 2020, the city has built 382 works of public spaces.

In recent years, the municipal authority has paid special attention to renovating and upgrading the flower gardens and parks system in the central urban area to create typical architectural and landscape spaces of the capital.

The current large parks such as Thủ Lệ and Bách Thảo parks in Ba Đình District, Thống Nhất and Tuổi Trẻ parks in Hai Bà Trưng District have an area of ​​10-50ha each along with natural lakes and flower gardens make the city’s landscape beautiful and improve the microclimate for the areas.

Along with the projected investment by the State budget, many public works such as parks, flower gardens, squares and lakes in new residential areas are invested in and built by the investors.

Five water supply projects have been completed, bringing the total capacity of the water supply of water plants in the city to about 1.5 million cu.m per day. This means 100 per cent of the city’s population can have access to clean water.

Currently, the rate of public green land area in inner cities reaches 7.87 sq.m per person, and the average rate of garbage collection in urban areas is over 97.6 per cent. The city’s waste is treated by landfilling and incineration.

The amount of domestic wastewater collected and treated meets 28.8 per cent of the total generated volume.

Currently, waste and wastewater discharge and treatment of almost 100 per cent of industrial parks and large-scale production facilities are well monitored.

Shortcomings

Although green growth indicators are improving, there are many limitations and shortcomings, according to the Hà Nội Construction Department.

Specifically, the land fund for green areas is still limited.

The city-managed parks and flower gardens in four inner-city districts of Hoàn Kiếm, Ba Đình, Hai Bà Trưng and Đống Đa are public works that were built for a long time and have started degrading while there is lack of land fund for building new parks in densely populated areas such as Cầu Giấy and Hoàng Mai districts.

Another feature is that Hà Nội has many lakes, especially a very large lake – the West Lake, but the lakes often have to receive a large amount of untreated wastewater that make them gradually become shallower over time, accumulating a thick layer of mud of 0.5 – 1m.

Most of the lakes are not embanked, so it is difficult to control illegal encroachment and garbage dumping into the lakes.

According to the Hà Nội Natural Resources and Environment Department, the city’s urban natural water surface area decreased by 11.11ha in 2015 and 192.52ha by 2020.

Thus, from 2015-to 2020, the total urban natural water surface area dropped by 203.63ha.

In general, the water surface and agricultural land areas are gradually shrinking due to the fast urbanisation rate in the city. Many ponds and lakes have been filled to make the land for urban residential and technical infrastructure development, let alone the situation of people illegally encroaching on the water surface areas for doing business.

The city still lacks specific and appropriate mechanisms and policies to encourage all economic sectors and people to participate in growing green trees.

Financial resources for investment in upgrading and building clean water supply infrastructure are limited, and many clean water supply plants have not invested in modern technology.

Regarding the waste treatment, the waste separation at the source has not been implemented synchronously, and the waste collection and recycling are entirely spontaneous.

The construction progress of waste treatment plants is still slow due to difficulty choosing investors and the lack of regulations on waste treatment.

Fund mobilisation for green growth

To reach the targets of urban construction towards green growth for 2021-25, the Construction Department has proposed the city mobilise and arrange resources for the implementation and acceleration of related projects.

The city also needs to make a plan to mobilise resources for applying science and technology to green growth in urban areas, improving urban-rural connectivity, and investing in urban waste and wastewater treatment.

The city also needs to further invest in the construction and renovation of low-income residential areas and building more public spaces.

In addition, it is necessary to complete legal documents and promulgate mechanisms and policies to mobilise domestic and international resources for urban development towards green growth and climate change response. —

 

 

Source: https://vietnamnews.vn/environment/1193560/ha-noi-needs-to-combine-green-growth-with-urban-development.html

Sci-tech-environment

Viet Nam’s fintech reaches new heights

Viet Nam’s fintech has reached new heights and the newly introduced regulatory sandbox is further fueling its growth.

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The country’s fintech market is forecast to reach a staggering US$18 billion mark by 2024, according to an article on asiaone.com of Singapore.

Housing close to 200 fintech organizations, now 66 percent of adults have payment accounts as listed by the Ministry of Planning and Investment. The perfect medley of 91.3 million smartphone subscribers and an internet penetration rate of 73.2 percent have made the situation more conducive for the industry’s growth.

The success of these promising fintech organizations has been linked with their close ties with the banking sector that has created invaluable synergies.

The Viet Nam Banks Association (VNBA) has always been upfront in bringing favorable changes to the country’s financial services industry, be it for lowering SMS charges for banking services or urging Visa and Mastercard to reduce several types of fees on Vietnamese banks during COVID-19. 

Its most recent move got a lot of attention when it stepped forward as the official supporting partner for World Financial Innovation Series (WFIS) that’s shaping to be the country’s premier fintech event.

The National Digital Transformation Program by 2025, with an orientation towards 2030, which was approved in September 2021, sets the goal that 50 percent of banking operations by customers to be fully online. 

In addition, half of the population have a digital checking account while 70 percent of customer transactions made through digital channels. 

Besides, half of decisions on lending, small and consumer loans of individual customers made digitally and are automated whilst 70 percent of work and service records at credit institutions to be processed and stored digitally.

Source: VGP

Source: https://e.nhipcaudautu.vn/tech/viet-nams-fintech-reaches-new-heights-3351493/

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Digital banks attract significant numbers of customers

The number of new customers of commercial banks has increased dramatically in recent years thanks to their digital applications.

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After only six months of launching MyVIB 2.0 digital banking application – which uses multi-cloud computing technology to process 60-70 per cent of the input data to help banks realise ideas, bring products and services to the market faster and respond sooner to customer requests, VIB has doubled the number of customers compared to the previous year and reach the target of 4 million customers nearly a year earlier than expected.

Not only VIB, the wave of “cloudisation” of digital banking applications to expand modes and storage capacity, and increase integrated processing and user data security capacity has been invested in and implemented by many commercial banks.

Currently, VietABank, PVcomBank, VietinBank, Techcombank, SeABank, ABBank and OCB have all integrated cloud computing technologies to launch new digital banking platforms serving the sales of retail products and services, attracting millions of users.

The business results by the end of 2022 of banks showed a sharp increase in the number of new customers attracted by banks thanks to their digital applications. For example, MB last year added 7 million customers in the wake of developing Biz MBBank and Charity app while Techcombank with E-Banking apps (using AWS cloud computing technology) attracted an additional 1.2 million users in 2022. ACB and TPBank also said they recorded an annual growth of 30 per cent in the number of customers using digital applications in the 2019-22 period.

Along with the increase in the number of customers, the investment in new technologies and digitalisation of business activities have helped many banks attain significant achievements. For VIB and ACB, the proportion of revenue from retail activities was around 90 per cent in 2022. Retail activities at other banks such as MB, Techcombank and Sacombank currently account for more than 50 per cent of their business portfolio.

Recent research by Gimigo Vietnam showed 2023 will continue to witness fierce competition between banks in developing retail digital banking applications to gain market share.

According to Gimigo, the group of large State-owned banks such as Vietcombank, BIDV, Agribank, VietinBank and MB was leading in the retail segment thanks to being trusted by users and having a widespread network by the end of 2022. However, the group of private banks such as Techcombank, Sacombank, ACB, VPBank and TPBank have significantly improved their awareness level and attracted a large number of users in recent months.

Gimigo’s survey in Ha Noi, HCM City and some other big cities showed the digital applications of Techcombank, ACB and Sacombank are currently competing strongly with large-sized State-owned banks. Other private banks such as TPBank and VPBank also have high net promoter scores (NPS). Thus, the group of banks has many opportunities to expand the customer base thanks to the existing group of loyal customers and the new customers.

According to experts, developing the networks of branches, transaction offices, POS and ATMs is no longer the banks’ top priority. Instead, they focus on digitisation of products and services. To maintain the number of customers, banks need to pay more attention to transaction costs, quality of products and services, staff attitude, customer service, and continuous improvement of online procedures.

Regarding the development trend of digital application generations this year, Gimigo said besides investment in cloud computing technologies and applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to develop applications to support retail sales of products and services, banks will tend to pour in an integrated open banking ecosystem.

Some banks, which have so far invested in purely digital banking models such as Cake, Timo, Tnex, Octo and Ubank, have attracted users. For example, VPBank’s Cake app currently has 1 million users.

Experts forecast banks will invest more in developing completely new digital banking brands in the near future. In which, micro products and services will be integrated into personal financial management tools to attract customers to use banks’ retail products and services. 

Source: Việt Nam News

Source: https://e.nhipcaudautu.vn/tech/digital-banks-attract-significant-numbers-of-customers-3351467/

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Over 57,000 ransomware attacks hit Vietnam in 2022

Ransomware is targeting businesses throughout Southeast Asia.

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Vietnam suffered 57,389 ransomware attacks in 2022, the third-highest in Southeast Asia following Indonesia and Thailand.

The region recorded a total of 340,904 ransomware attacks targeting businesses last year, General Manager of Kaspersky for Southeast Asia Yeo Siang Tiong told a press briefing in Ho Chi Minh City on March 14.

Ransomware is a type of malware that locks a computer and mobile device or encrypts electronic files. To obtain the “decryption” key or retrieve data, a ransom is sought by the cybercriminals behind the attack.

Digital kidnappers are targeting enterprises in Southeast Asia, Mr. Yeo said, and the trend is forecast to continue increasing this year and see more complicated attacks.

Source: VnEconomy

Source: https://e.nhipcaudautu.vn/tech/over-57000-ransomware-attacks-hit-vietnam-in-2022-3351226/

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