Content area
Full text
1. Introduction
The rapid growth of financial technology (fintech) has imposed several challenges on the global banking system (IMF, 2022), especially in the metaverse era (Ooi et al., 2023). Vives (2017) outlined various strategies that conventional banks have adopted to respond to the expansion of fintech in the markets. One of the critical concepts is bank–fintech cooperation (BFC), which has attracted much attention from practitioners, policymakers and academic researchers (Alalwan et al., 2024; Cosma and Pennetta, 2024). In fact, almost 9 in 10 financial institutions have asserted that cooperation with fintech is crucial to their business, rising from 49% in 2019 to 89% in 2022 (Cornerstone Advisors, 2022). It is also reported that approximately 65% of the surveyed financial institutions entered at least one partnership with fintech firms over the past 3 years. Of those not partnered, 37% planned to enter a partnership within a year. Therefore, this motivates researchers to examine the effects of BFC on banks’ performance.
Vietnam is considered to be the next dragon in Asia, with the average growth rate of gross domestic being 6.46% from 2007 to 2019. The banking sector has played a primary role in this remarkable achievement (Le, 2019). Additionally, this country has recently experienced the rapid development of fintech since 2006. For example, the number of fintech firms in Vietnam approximately tripled from 44 in 2017 to 124 in 2019 (Fintech News Singapore, 2020). In 2019, Vietnam was ranked second in the Association of South East Asian Nations regarding fintech funding, just behind Singapore, attracting approximately 36% of fintech investment in the region (Fintech News Vietnam, 2020). Indeed, the total funding value of fintech deals in Vietnam increased 13 times from $US28.8m in 2016 to $US403m in 2019 (Statista, 2023). In response, the Vietnamese authorities have provided several incentives to speed up the development of fintech firms, thus inducing Vietnamese commercial banks to develop different strategies. In line with global banking trends, Vietnamese banks have partnered strategically with fintech firms specializing in various segments (e.g. digital payment, comparison information, digital banking and infrastructure, etc.) (Fintech News Singapore, 2020). However, several studies have provided comprehensive discussions on the trade-off effect of BFC (Enriques and Ringe, 2020; Carbó-Valverde et al., 2021; Hornuf et al.,...