Vietnam’s economy grew by just over 8% in 2025, the second-highest rate in a decade. Hanoi’s ambitions are even more aggressive: It wants Vietnam to grow by 10% a year by 2030, and reach high-income status by 2045, a jump that would require a tripling of its per capita gross national income. 

But an ambitious economic program needs capital. The Southeast Asian country has a $200 billion financing gap, to be put towards transport, energy and digital infrastructure.

FTSE is set to upgrade Vietnam to secondary emerging market status in September, which will help bring more foreign money into the country. But Lottner thinks that won’t be enough to fill the gap. 

“People say that $3 to $5 billion of equity may come in,” Lottner estimates in a conversation with Fortune. “But if you need $1.1 trillion of investment in total, it’s not quite moving the needle.”

“There’s no way all these infrastructure investments can be financed by the local banking ecosystems,” he says. “Vietnam’s deposit-generating capacity just isn’t big enough.”

That leaves an opening for Techcombank, one of Vietnam’s largest privately-owned banks that boasts both foreign backers and a foreign CEO in Lottner, to be a “pathfinder” for overseas investors, signaling which local businesses and projects are worth investing in. 

“We’ll go in and finance the early stages,” Lottner explains. “Then we restructure the loans and partition them out so that different investors can enter two to three years later.” He envisions a structure where Techcombank might attract up to five dollars of co-investment for every dollar it puts in. 

Techcombank has committed about $3 billion to national infrastructure initiatives, many of which were launched in the past six months. Lottner admits that number is small compared to what’s required, “but if you want to make it possible to fund these projects, you need to find that capacity right now.”

Retooling a legacy bank

Founded in 1993 by a group of Vietnamese businessmen returning from Russia, Techcombank began serving private enterprises and retail customers during the Doi Moi period, when Vietnam began its transition from a centrally-planned economy to a market-based one.  

Today, Techcombank is one of Vietnam’s largest private banks, alongside competitors like VPBank and Military Bank (MBBank). It reported $3.52 billion in revenue in 2025, a 5.7% increase; profits too, rose 13% to $972.5 million. Techcombank now ranks No. 103 on the Fortune Southeast Asia 500, rising three spots since 2025. 

Lottner, a native of Germany, moved to Vietnam to serve as Techcombank’s CEO in 2020, after spending three decades at McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank. 

Now in his second term as CEO, Lottner is paying close attention to AI as he seeks to build an “agent-operated bank,” where AI agents handle routine operations while humans work on tasks like innovation, risk adjustment and relationship management. 

Lottner doesn’t have a timeline for when agents will really take off. “We are probably overestimating how quickly it will take place,” he says. “But the strategy is very clear: We will build and rethink everything on the assumption that over time, agents will take over a lot of our work.”

Techombank is also looking for talent in interesting places. Last November, the bank announced it will grant a $1 million scholarship to the top-performing team from Vietnam’s “National AI Challenge,” a televised competition featuring a four-stage format which focuses on AI model building and real-world problem solving. That move is “completely self-serving,” Lottner says. “We need those talents.”

“At the event, we’ll get visibility of 1,000 of Vietnam’s best data engineers and data scientists. And if local talent is constrained, we need to invest,” he says. (Vietnam experiences significant brain drain, with up to 80% of self-sponsored students studying abroad opting not to return after completing their education, according to a 2024 report by the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.) 

Lottner is also paying attention to Vietnam’s pledge to double its count of small- and medium-sized enterprises to 2 million by 2020. “We want to do more in the SME space than we have in the past,” he says. “Going down the value chain is relatively easy for us.”

The next wave of Vietnamese wealth

Vietnam’s economic growth has led to a growing middle- and upper-class. Vietnam’s middle-class made up 13% of its population in 2023; Eastspring Investments predicted that this statistic could double by 2026. The country’s ultra-high-net-worth population is set to grow by almost 60% by 2031, which would be the fourth-fastest growth rate globally, according to Knight Frank’s 2026 wealth report. 

Lottner says Techcombank already has “good offerings” for Vietnam’s emerging middle class, but he’s already looking at a wealthier customer base. “There are people who are getting wealthy, and have over $5 million in assets,” he says. “They would qualify for tailored wealth management services in other markets, but there’s no such comparable service here.” 

Vietnam’s wealthy segment has traditionally invested in real estate, gold and the U.S. dollar; A 2020 article by local publication VietNamNet notes that 90% of Vietnam’s more than 12 million millionaires invest in property. Yet, according to Asian wealth management publication Hubbis, they’re now turning to products like mutual funds, structured products and offshore access.

To cater to these individuals, Techcombank plans to roll out an “enriched” suite of wealth management plans, including private credit, for wealthy Vietnamese. Lottner also plans to train the bank’s existing relationship managers to create a hyper-personalized banking experience for clients. “They would want somebody who can talk to them intelligently about a broader set of topics, and give them advice on wealth generation, protection and transfer,” Lottner says. 

The bank also plans to bolster its brokerage, Techcom Securities. Last September, it publicly listed the subsidiary on Vietnam’s stock exchange, raising 10.8 trillion Vietnamese dong ($410 million), one of the largest IPOs that year. “Our securities bank will probably become much more like a real investment bank, because it will have equity and bond wealth management capabilities,” Lottner says.

Techcombank is also looking into cryptocurrency. Trading in digital assets like Bitcoin is currently illegal, but Hanoi is inching towards setting up a licensing regime for local exchanges. Techcombank was the first financial institution to apply for a license, and executives have openly expressed their eagerness to work with digital assets.

Lottner thinks that legalizing cryptocurrencies will be another way to bring capital back into the system. “A third of Vietnamese have cryptocurrencies. It’s not even grey, it’s actually quite black—the idea is to bring that money back so it can be used for financing.”

Energy and demographic bottlenecks

Global economic forecasts have been less bullish on Vietnam’s economic future compared to the government. The World Bank expects the country’s GDP to grow by 6.3% this year; the Asian Development Bank forecasts a more rosy 7.2%, but still short of Hanoi’s official target of 10%. (“The World Bank always has much more conservative figures, and in a lot of cases, they were actually proven wrong,” points Lottner.)

Energy, however, remains a headwind. Vietnam imports much of its oil, gas, and other refined fuel products, which leaves the Southeast Asian country exposed to energy shocks. In 2025, Vietnam’s coal imports hit a record high of 65.43 million tonnes, surpassing the previous record of 63.82 million tonnes in 2024, according to commodities market intelligence firm Argus Media.

The Iran war has also strained oil markets, as fuel, much of it bound for Asia, can’t transit the blocked Strait of Hormuz. Vietnam has already tapped its emergency fuel fund to stabilize prices, while local airlines slashed flights due to spikes in jet fuel prices. In March, Hanoi also inked an agreement with Russia to cooperate on the construction of Southeast Asia’s first operational nuclear power plant, which is set to go live in the next decade.

There’s a second threat on the horizon: this year’s “Super El Nino,” a weather phenomenon that’s likely to bring intense heatwaves and drought to much of Southeast Asia later this year. That will both increase energy demands as people switch on cooling systems, and threaten food inflation as agricultural yields drop.

The global AI boom also relies on steady access to power. According to the International Energy Agency, a typical AI data center saps as much energy as 100,000 households, while the largest ones being built today will consume 20 times as much. “For the big hyperscalers looking to come to Vietnam, their first question is not about the availability of land, but whether there’s a sufficient, reliable supply of energy,” Lottner says. “Let’s be clear, there’s not enough right now.” 

Lottner argues that Vietnam is one of a handful of countries with enough wind, water and geothermal power to be fully green–if it can get enough investment to build out its infrastructure. Between 2018 and 2023, the country scaled its solar and wind capacity from zero to 21,000 MW, funded by billions of dollars in investments fueled by feed-in tariffs, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. 

And time is running out. Vietnam’s population is already getting older, with over 25% of its population slated to be aged 60 and above by 2050, according to the United Nations Population Fund. “All of this needs to be done within 20 years, because once your population starts aging, it’s very hard to get higher growth numbers,” Lottner concludes.

“Ultimately, time is really our scarcest resource.”

In Fortune’s “Asia Agenda” column, released twice a month, we speak with Asia’s top business leaders about how they are building for the future and the lessons they’ve drawn from leading companies in one of the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic regions. Explore all of our profiles here.