K PLUS Vietnam — Thailand’s №1 Banking Application Goes Regional
KASIKORNBANK’s mobile banking application, K PLUS, is one of the most used in Thailand and recognized as the number one mobile banking application in the country. What happens when we try to bring it overseas for the first time? Today, we talked to the K PLUS Vietnam team at KBTG who are responsible for bringing the services over, representing their team members from both the development and execution side.
Let’s get to know the team members in this interview!
- P’Tipp Head of Delivery Management, overseeing the project to implement services of K PLUS Vietnam
- P’Jack Senior Business Analyst, coordinating between the business user and KBTG working team
- P’Mac Senior Software Engineer, taking care of both iOS and Android development
- P’Pook Project Management Office Supervisor, communicating among BUs and other stakeholders
The Bigger Picture
K PLUS’ entry to the Vietnam market is remarkable on its own, but it is also a significant step in KBank and KBTG’s regional expansion plan. The application in Thailand has one of the largest bases with over 18 million trusted users. With the bigger picture in mind, teams involved in each part of KBTG Vietnam are executing steps to lay the foundation of the regional infrastructure, paving the way forward as we enter Vietnam and other countries in the future. The assignment was not only to create an application for Vietnam, but to initiate a regional app, making sure its functions and security will be able to transfer seamlessly for other countries and their users.
KASIKORNBANK in Vietnam
As a market, Vietnam is a key target due to its population size of over 97 million, consisting of 40–70 million in the application’s primary user group. KBank established its first local branch in Ho Chi Minh City in November 2021. With that groundwork in place, K PLUS Vietnam soon followed. The application is not meant to be a one-off but has to find its place in the regional infrastructure, firstly linking back to its base in Thailand. This also means functions must comply with regulations from both countries.
One of the differentiating factors for K PLUS Vietnam is that KBank currently only has one physical branch in Ho Chi Minh City, in contrast to the easily accessible branches located across Thailand. Therefore, our development approach was essentially mobile-first, reducing the need for physical verification as much as possible without compromising security standards. E-KYC was one of the mandatory solutions for user convenience. Features are cleverly catered for Vietnamese user’s behaviors and preferences, offering services that are not widely available from other banks such as e-statement request, transaction limit setting, QR code transfer, and many more to come.
Coming Together
K PLUS Vietnam was first initiated from the foundation of the K PLUS team in Thailand. Requirements were gathered from all business unit teams to determine what needed to change in this version of the application. Next was the design phase, working to find the balance between maintaining KBank’s branding and Vietnamese user’s behaviors. To make sure functions were efficient and safe, we consulted the cyber security team to draw up an AEC (ASEAN Economic Community)-fitted infrastructure that is unique from the one in Thailand. Then came the testing phase with SQM team, running various tests such as customer phasing, system integration, user acceptance test, penetration tests, performance tests, and more.
Thorough research was conducted to produce a user-friendly and culturally relevant application, we surveyed existing services in Vietnam to identify common or different features to figure out how we could stand out. This was used in parallel with findings on user habits, picking out details for each age group, profession or lifestyle. As a result, although both versions of the application may look similar, user journey and feature details have been accurately adapted for local customers.
For better understanding, think of K PLUS as the front-platform which must be connected to our complex back-end systems. Some of the most important links would be to our core banking, integration, or payment hub. To test and integrate everything without delaying execution, we split the implementation into three MVP phases, with the first one released on 14 February, the second on 13 March and the third one currently in development.
MVP1 Key Features
- Fund Transfer (Intrabank, Interbank)
- New Onboarding/Self-registration
- Balance Inquiry (Deposit & Credit)
- Transaction History
- E-Slip
- Security / Authorization / Verification function
- Biometric Features (Fingerprint & Face)
- In-app Notification — Loan Approval
MVP2 Key Features
- Bill Payment
- Top Up
- New Onboarding/Self-registration (Referrer)
- A/C Statement Request
- Add 2nd A/C
- Update Consent (PDPA)
- Feeds with Action
- In-app Notification — Transaction Alert
- My Favorite
Challenges
Along the process, the team tackled many obstacles and interestingly, one of those was to reevaluate the existing architecture of K PLUS. Thailand’s version of K PLUS became a reliable base point, to which additional tools and software packages were implemented to increase longevity and security. The architecture was updated to be more modern, fitting to the regional environment firstly for Vietnam and is getting ready for a second country.
At KBTG customer-centric research is essential to our products, the team in Thailand had to gain rapid understanding of regulations and business roles in Vietnam to adjust their perspective in determining what works best. The project timeline also coincided with the peak of COVID-19. This eliminated traditional group communications such as in-person brainstorms or pair programming for a project like this, but the team was agile in adapting new tools and channels to get ideas across efficiently.
In putting together the new regional K PLUS team, it was a challenge to recruit developers and we invested a lot of time into it. In effect, not having the capacity of a full team impacted the delivery timeline, which in the end was still complete as expected at the expense of a super high workload. We also have a Vietnamese developer team working with us, thus communication issues between the Thai and Vietnam team were anticipated. Both teams took some time to tune in with each other but now are working together very well. Due to the ever-increasing team size, they now mostly work as scrum teams to maximize output.
ONE Team
Another perk of remote working was discovered in this project, since we were already so used to working separately during COVID-19, the task of working remotely with international teams also became less daunting. During the very first steps of product testing, it was our Vietnam team who were first to try out the application, as the process required local identity verification. As real users in the environment, they gave valuable input from a cultural context, recommending user preferences and common use cases. They are dedicated, communicate with transparency, deliver all commitments, and are very helpful in communicating with third party stakeholders. Although located in different countries, we now operate extremely well as a cross-culture working team!
Want to learn more about us? Visit https://www.kbtg.tech
