My 2023 in Review

5 min readFeb 22, 2024

I am very grateful for 2023 despite all its hurdles and its sad news. I had a great year and get to deliver remarkable business results with my amazing colleagues who are extremely humble and talented at HDBank, very hard to mention names as the list is pretty long. Kudos to you all for your great collaboration.

I will summarize the 2023 in following sections
1. Books
2. Articles
3. Serving my Life Purpose (My current job)

1. Books

I cannot believe this myself that somehow I have managed to read slightly over 100 books, perhaps one of my highest ever for years to come. You can see list of all these 102 books in GoodReads however in below I list few of them that I enjoyed:

Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work … and What Does: More Breakthroughs for Leading, Energizing, and Engaging (quite similar concept to Drive)
Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
Leonardo da Vinci and Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma
Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity
Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality
Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity
Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology
The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health — and Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More
Raising Men: Lessons Navy SEALs Learned from Their Training and Taught to Their Sons

2. Articles

I have two main threads of articles that I spend my time to evolve them as I get more experienced as well.

2.1 Cloud Journeys

Cloud Journey — Part 1. A basic introduction of cloud, applying PACE layering and The 6R’s.
Cloud Journey — Part 2. A quick review on what is the good organization chart to enable cloud journey.
Cloud Journey — Part 3. A quick view on Business Values and Business Drivers on a cloud journey.
Cloud Journey — Part 4. What does cloud mean for your “Talents & Culture”?
Cloud Journey — Part 5. Using Platform Ops to accelerate DevSecOps adoption
Cloud Journey — Part 6 | Foundations of Cloud Architecture
Cloud Journey — Part 7 | Customer Data Platform (CDP)
Cloud Journey — Part 8 | Customer Data Strategy
Cloud Journey — Part 9 | Cloud for CFOs
Cloud Journey — Part 10 | FinOps

2.2 Cloud Journeys

3. Serving my Life Purpose (My current job)

After great results that team created for my previous employer (Techcom) it was time for me to move back home to my family despite the great time I had with team and I miss them often. After few months of negotiations, finally in May 2022 we came to terms with HDBank.

Very quickly we launched our 0-fee (freemium banking) and waived all unnecessary barriers for customers to become a digitally active user. Then we started working on 1'Click Banking model. To be empathic with customers, we must discover what they might need, and offer it to them at the right time. As part of our “Empathic Banking” strategy, I explained how, through financial services, we can bring meaningful and impactful touches to our customers. You can read more about this in 2022 post.

3.1 Quick Digital Growth Updates

I like to quickly give some highlights about growth we have made on couple of metrics, we have nearly grew our digital business in two years in average 3.95 times, the detail metrics are in following:

3.9 times growth in acquiring new customers, thanks to our ecosystem ( VietJet Air and HD SAISON Finance Co., Ltd ) players.
3.4 times growth in our financial active customers and 3.3 times growth on our engaged customers
4.24 times growth in our number of logins
3.31 times in our monthly financial active customers
4.55 times growth in our in-app financial transactions
2.7 times growth in our digital app users
8.34 times growth in our in-app deposits
7.4 times growth on our in app lending book value
nearly doubling our digital operating income

3.2 Continuous Delivery & Innovation

At HDBank in 2022, we had 16 major releases on our app and in 2023 we have increased that to over 35 releases, growth YoY of 119%. We managed to achieve this great results solely because of our great team members and leaders.

3.3 Digital Sales

I strongly believe in having a great customer experience at branch for key services is rooted in a powerful employee experience. If our customer facing colleagues are equipped fully then they can serve our customers as target experience architecture. Kudos to all my colleagues in across all divisions for delivering such empowering journeys for our colleagues.