When large banks launch apps, independent e-wallets cannot compete on infrastructure or pure convenience. The ground they can hold is a narrow community, a human-centered experience, and an identity tied to a specific group of people. These are things that large, process-driven organizations find very hard to copy.
In this article · 6 sections
A market stall has four QR codes (quick-response codes for scanning to pay) stuck side by side. The buyer looks at them, unsure which code belongs to whom.
This isn't just a design problem, it's a question of where you stand.
The convenience war is settled
Independent e-wallets once won by doing what banks didn't: a friendly interface, fast top-ups, and frequent promotions.
But that game has changed. Large banks are investing in mobile apps, bringing payments, transfers and consumer loans into one place.
Their infrastructure is stronger, their user data is more readily available, and their communications budget is in a different league.
Competing head-on in convenience, small e-wallets will lose. Not because they are weaker, but because this is a battle of scale, and scale favors the banks.
The market is large, but so is the number of players. As QR payment becomes shared infrastructure, the "first mover" advantage of independent e-wallets is fading.
What banks can't buy
Large financial institutions excel at consistent operations. But that same consistency creates a limit: they serve everyone, so they can't belong to any one group.
This is where a small e-wallet can stand its ground.
A wallet that serves small vendors in traditional markets, and understands how they count money and keep their books, can create an experience that banks cannot, because banks do not design specifically for that group.
A wallet for young people in the creative industry, one that understands how they split money for group projects or pay for digital services from abroad, can become a tool they feel is their own.
A brand is how customers perceive a product, service or organization, not a logo or a slogan.
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap
Banks can copy features within a few months. But the feeling that "this wallet understands me" can't be copied with a software update.
Three viable positioning angles
Based on the market structure and the weaknesses of large organizations, there are three directions a small e-wallet can pursue.
One: A narrow, deep community. Instead of serving everyone, choose a group of users specific enough to truly understand.
Online sellers, freelancers, people who regularly send money back to their hometowns. Design the experience around how this group actually uses money, not how banks think they use it.
Two: Transparent like a person. Banks communicate like institutions, for good reason.
A small e-wallet can communicate like a real person: explain fees in plain Vietnamese, announce changes early, and admit mistakes when they happen.
The Edelman Trust Barometer 2025 shows the financial sector scoring only 64% on trust, near the bottom of the industries surveyed. That gap is there to be filled.
Three: An experience designed for one specific task, done really well. It does not need every feature.
You need a feature that this group of users uses every day and feels nothing does better than this wallet.
Identity is the real moat
Features can be copied. Identity can't, if it's built right.
The right identity isn't an unusual color or a distinctive logo. It's consistency between what the wallet promises, how it speaks, and how it behaves at every touchpoint.
- An app icon that stands out among dozens of other financial icons on a phone screen.
- The QR code at the point of sale carries a clear brand frame, so buyers know whose code it is and bad actors find it harder to paste over.
- A fixed transaction notification template locks the order of information, so users understand at a glance and are not fooled by fake messages.
- A consistent voice from error messages to the welcome screen, with no place that feels like it came from a different app.
These are things large banks tend to handle later, because they have many other things to handle first. For a small e-wallet, this is where you can lead.
The trap to avoid
There is a common trap: when big banks enter the market, small e-wallets try to look more like banks to appear more credible.
That is the wrong direction. Looking like a bank does not make you as credible as a bank. It only makes you blurrier in the eyes of users who are looking for a reason to choose between the two.
MoMo is worth watching. In its 2024 brand refresh, it did not try to look like a bank.
They drew inspiration from the patterns on Vietnamese banknotes, creating a visual language tied to local identity. The result is a clearer identity that doesn't fade into a crowd of blue.
For a smaller wallet, the lesson isn't to do what MoMo does. The lesson is to find what is genuinely your own, build the identity around it, and stay consistent long enough for users to remember.
The practical questions
Before building a brand, there is one question that needs a real answer: who does this e-wallet serve, specifically enough to know their names and daily needs?
If your answer is "Vietnamese people aged 18 to 45 with a smartphone", that is not yet an answer.
That is the market of everyone in the sector, and a market that belongs to everyone belongs to no one.
If the answer is “small vendors in the provinces who are not yet familiar with digital banking, who need fast payments and simple revenue tracking”, that is the foundation for building a real brand.
From there, design has work to do. The new voice has someone to talk to. And the new identity has a reason to exist that is different from the bank next door.
References
Kantar BrandZ, financial brand research. Edelman Trust Barometer 2025. Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap. Decision Lab, Vietnam e-wallet market report 2024. Payments Department, State Bank of Vietnam (via Báo Sài Gòn Giải Phóng, 19/11/2025).