Bringing Global Finance Back to Vietnam | Huynh Thanh Tuyen (Jamie Wellstern) of Galaxy Holdings

For years, Vietnam was frequently discussed as a market to watch. Investors observed its population growth, manufacturing expansion, rising middle class, digital adoption, and increasingly prominent role within Southeast Asia. The country appeared regularly in forecasts about future potential, yet much of the international conversation remained cautious. Vietnam was treated as promising, interesting, and worth monitoring, but still somehow waiting for its moment.

That perception is beginning to change. As Jamie Wilson observed during our conversation at the Vietnam Financial Forum 2026, Vietnam is no longer simply a market to observe. It is becoming a market in which serious participants increasingly feel they need to establish a presence. Her question was direct: why did it take so long?

Jamie, also known professionally as Miss Twin, is the director of Saigon Fintech Capital at Galaxy Holdings and one of the founding members involved with the Vietnam Financial Center. Her perspective is shaped by professional experience across several of the world’s financial centers, including London, Luxembourg, Moscow, Singapore, and Saigon. Yet what made our conversation particularly interesting was the way she connected national financial development with something far more personal: children, families, and the everyday relationship people have with money.

The Vietnam Financial Forum brought these themes together in Da Nang at an important moment. Vietnam’s international financial center is being developed through locations in Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang, with each city expected to contribute differently to a shared national project. Ho Chi Minh City brings commercial scale, financial history, institutional concentration, and an established business community. Da Nang offers a smaller but increasingly international environment with a strong quality of life, growing technology sector, coastal position, and the possibility of building a more specialized financial identity.

Jamie described the two locations as separate destinations connected by one mission. This framing matters because successful national development does not require every city to perform the same role. Ho Chi Minh City does not need to become Da Nang, and Da Nang would gain little by attempting to recreate Ho Chi Minh City on a smaller scale. Their value may come from serving different functions within the same ecosystem.

Da Nang’s quality of life formed an important part of Jamie’s assessment. She spoke about the balance the city offers to professionals and families: access to the beach, international events, a growing business community, and a calmer pace than many larger financial centers. For people accustomed to London, Singapore, Dubai, or Ho Chi Minh City, that balance can be more than an attractive lifestyle feature. It can become part of a city’s economic proposition.

Financial centers are often imagined through buildings, trading floors, regulations, and capital flows. Yet people must still live in them. They need homes, schools, healthcare, social communities, and a sense that professional ambition does not require sacrificing every other dimension of life. A city that can combine economic opportunity with family life may possess an advantage that is difficult to capture through conventional financial rankings.

Jamie’s own experience illustrates this shift in priorities. Before having children, she moved comfortably through demanding international environments, working in private equity and traveling frequently. Her life was connected to the energy of established financial districts, including Canary Wharf in London. Once she became a mother, however, the relationship between career and place changed.

The familiar language of work-life balance does not fully capture this experience. Jamie was refreshingly skeptical of those who claim to have achieved a perfect equilibrium between family and professional life. With three children and a demanding career, she sees balance as far less orderly than the polished version often presented in business media. Family needs change by the hour. Professional responsibilities do not pause politely while a child requires attention. Some days the balance exists, while on others it resembles a small administrative emergency conducted near a pile of toys.

Rather than attempting to keep work and family completely separate, Jamie and her husband began asking whether they could build their professional lives around their children. This did not mean reducing ambition or pretending that every business event should become a family outing. It meant questioning the assumption that children must always remain invisible within professional life.

At appropriate events, they began bringing their children with them. The children received uniforms, appeared at fintech gatherings, watched their parents speak, and experienced business environments directly. When event organizers refused to admit children, Jamie and her family sometimes chose not to participate. Her position was unapologetic: if their work concerns financial tools for families and the next generation, excluding the family from the professional environment creates an obvious contradiction.

This idea challenges long-standing expectations about professionalism. Corporate spaces have traditionally been organized around the assumption that workers arrive without visible family responsibilities. Children remain elsewhere, cared for by another person or institution, while the professional self enters the office, conference, or networking event alone. Remote work during the pandemic disrupted this illusion. Colleagues saw children enter video calls, heard family life in the background, and became more familiar with the fact that accomplished professionals are also parents, partners, and caregivers.

Jamie sees this increased acceptance as a positive shift. Children learn partly through instruction, but much of their understanding develops through observation. They watch how adults speak, make decisions, interact with strangers, manage responsibility, and respond to pressure. They absorb the professional environment even when they cannot yet explain what is happening.

A child who watches a parent prepare for a presentation, attend a conference, negotiate with partners, or discuss business begins forming an understanding of work that no classroom lecture can fully reproduce. Public speaking becomes familiar. Networking becomes less mysterious. Professional confidence appears as something practiced rather than inherited.

This is especially important because many children reach adulthood with only a vague understanding of what their parents actually do. They know that a mother or father goes to work, joins meetings, or uses a laptop, but the professional activity remains abstract. By allowing children to witness appropriate parts of that world, parents can make work, leadership, entrepreneurship, and financial decision-making more tangible.

Jamie summarized the principle simply: children learn through what they see.

The same argument applies to financial literacy. Parents can speak repeatedly about saving, budgeting, and the value of money, but those ideas become more powerful when children participate in everyday decisions. A supermarket, toy shop, holiday budget, or family purchase can become a practical lesson in choice and trade-offs.

The challenge is becoming more urgent because money itself is disappearing from view.

Many adults grew up counting coins, receiving cash allowances, filling piggy banks, and handing physical notes to shopkeepers. These experiences helped establish a concrete relationship between labor, spending, and scarcity. Money could be held, separated, saved, lost, and visibly reduced.

Children growing up in cashless societies experience something very different. Payments happen through phones, QR codes, cards, applications, and digital transfers. The transaction may take less than a second. Nothing physical changes hands, and the child sees no visible reduction in available resources.

Jamie shared a memorable example from her own family. When her young son wanted a toy, she explained that she did not have the budget for it. His response was entirely logical from his perspective: the money is in the phone.

That sentence captures one of the central problems facing financial education in the digital age.

To a child, the phone can appear to contain an unlimited supply of money. A parent taps the screen, and food appears. A card touches a machine, and a purchase is approved. A QR code is scanned, and the transaction is complete. The connection between the digital action and the limited financial resources behind it remains invisible.

The psychology of money changes when payment loses its physical form. Cash creates friction. A person can see the money leave their hand. Digital systems reduce that friction, which makes commerce more efficient but can also make spending feel less consequential. Adults struggle with this effect, and children may have even fewer reference points for understanding it.

Jamie’s work in family-focused fintech responds to this problem. Her goal is not simply to create another payment application. It is to build financial tools that help children and parents develop a clearer relationship with earning, saving, budgeting, and responsibility.

One approach involves connecting rewards with age-appropriate household tasks and routines. Children can earn points or financial rewards by completing responsibilities, following through with homework, maintaining daily habits, or contributing to family life. The purpose is not to commercialize every act of cooperation or turn childhood into an invoice system. It is to help children understand that resources are connected to effort, choices, and responsibility.

This distinction is important. Gifts and unconditional care remain essential parts of family life. Yet children also benefit from understanding that wants and needs are different, that budgets have limits, and that obtaining something may require time and effort.

Jamie described a simple exercise in which her children entered a shop with a fixed spending limit of three pounds each. Once they understood the cap, they stopped focusing on more expensive items and began evaluating what they could obtain within the available budget. The limitation did not destroy the experience. It created a framework for decision-making.

This is one of the most practical ways to teach financial literacy. Children do not need a lecture on monetary policy while standing in the toy aisle. They need clear boundaries and the opportunity to make choices within them. A fixed budget teaches prioritization. Choosing between products introduces opportunity cost. Waiting for a future purchase teaches delayed gratification. Comparing price and usefulness develops judgment.

Similar exercises can occur in supermarkets. A child can be given a budget and asked to select a dessert, meal ingredient, or household item. Parents can then discuss price, quantity, health, durability, and value. These conversations connect financial decision-making with daily life rather than presenting money as an abstract subject reserved for adulthood.

Jamie’s emphasis on children also reveals a broader weakness in financial education. Employment within finance does not automatically create personal financial competence. She observed that people working inside major banks can still struggle with personal cash flow, credit card debt, mortgages, and long-term planning. Technical knowledge of financial products does not always translate into healthy financial behavior.

This gap appears across many professions. Doctors may neglect their own health. Communication specialists may struggle in their relationships. Leadership scholars can still become terrible managers before breakfast. Knowledge provides tools, but habits, emotions, social expectations, and personal experience determine how those tools are used.

Financial literacy therefore requires more than explaining how banks, investments, or interest rates function. It also involves understanding behavior. Why do people spend impulsively? Why do they avoid reviewing their finances? Why does financial status become connected to identity? Why do some individuals increase their consumption whenever their income rises?

These questions become even more important as banking moves away from physical branches. Jamie referred to the continuing expansion of digital and neobanking models. Her children’s generation may grow up with little reason to enter a traditional bank. They will still need banking services, but the institution itself may become largely invisible.

This does not eliminate the need for financial education. It increases it.

When money becomes easier to move, people need stronger internal systems for deciding where it should go. Convenience reduces administrative effort but does not create wisdom. A payment may be frictionless while the consequences remain very real.

Jamie’s work sits within this wider transformation of finance. She is helping develop Saigon Fintech Capital as part of a broader ecosystem intended to support fintech founders, investors, incubators, and international companies entering Vietnam. The objective is to create a recognizable gateway, similar to the established fintech hubs associated with cities such as London and Singapore.

Her ambition is that professionals considering Vietnam should know where to begin. Rather than spending months trying to understand the regulatory environment, build networks, identify partners, and reach potential customers independently, founders could enter an ecosystem capable of accelerating those processes.

This kind of institutional gateway can play an important role in emerging financial centers. International investors and startups often encounter fragmented information. They must interpret regulations, identify trustworthy partners, understand local consumer behavior, and determine which opportunities are genuine. The cost of uncertainty can discourage entry even when the market itself appears attractive.

An effective hub reduces that uncertainty. It does not guarantee success, but it can shorten the distance between interest and informed action. It can provide connections to capital, banking, technology, aviation, customer networks, professional services, and regulatory guidance.

Jamie emphasized the breadth of the ecosystem connected to Galaxy Holdings and Sovico Group. Their interests extend across banking, digital finance, technology, aviation, investment, and other sectors. For a startup, this creates opportunities to connect with established infrastructure and customer networks rather than attempting to build every relationship from the beginning.

The language of ecosystems is often overused in business, but in this context it is useful. A genuine ecosystem allows ideas, capital, expertise, customers, and institutions to interact. Its strength comes from the connections between participants rather than the size of any single organization.

Jamie’s description also reflects a wider change within startup culture. Companies are becoming less isolated within narrowly defined sectors. A payment technology may connect with retail, aviation, tourism, education, logistics, or healthcare. A financial product designed for children may involve banking, behavioral psychology, family education, digital identity, and data security.

The most valuable opportunities may appear at these intersections.

Vietnam is well positioned to participate in this process because of its young population, high levels of digital adoption, entrepreneurial culture, and continued economic growth. Jamie’s international contacts increasingly view the country as a place in which they must participate rather than merely conduct research from a distance.

Her return to Vietnam was closely connected to this shift. While working in London, she saw news of the country’s international financial center initiative and felt that the timing had changed. For years, she had supported European investors and fintech companies interested in Vietnam from abroad. The formal establishment of the financial center suggested that the country was entering a new stage.

She believed her experience across Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Singapore, and Vietnam could contribute to the project. This international background offers a comparative perspective. Jamie has observed how established financial centers organize themselves, how fintech communities develop, and how regulators and companies interact in different jurisdictions.

The challenge is applying those lessons without assuming that Vietnam must copy another country’s system. London, Singapore, Dubai, Luxembourg, and New York developed through different histories, institutions, and political environments. Vietnam can learn from each of them while still creating a model suited to its own priorities.

Jamie identified one of the most immediate challenges as the gap between government and the corporate sector. Government institutions establish national strategy, regulatory principles, and long-term objectives. Companies and entrepreneurs operate closer to customers, products, investment decisions, and market constraints. Both sides may support the same general goal while speaking very different professional languages.

This gap can become especially visible during the early development of a financial center. Government bodies may still be defining areas of responsibility, regulatory sandboxes, approval processes, and institutional boundaries. Companies want clarity and speed because investment decisions cannot remain indefinite. During this transitional period, responsibilities can overlap and communication can become difficult.

Jamie argued for more structured dialogue between policymakers, fintech founders, investors, and corporate leaders. The purpose would not be for one side to dictate to the other, but to develop a shared understanding of practical requirements and national objectives.

This middle ground is essential. Policy created without market input may become difficult to implement. Market demands without public oversight may conflict with broader economic or social goals. The challenge is to design institutions capable of protecting stability while allowing enough flexibility for innovation.

Financial centers depend heavily on trust. Investors need confidence in regulation, transparency, dispute resolution, and long-term policy direction. Entrepreneurs need confidence that rules will be understandable and decisions will occur within commercially realistic timelines. Governments need confidence that companies will operate responsibly and contribute to national development.

Closing the gap between these groups will require repeated communication rather than one conference or policy document.

This is where events such as the Vietnam Financial Forum can provide value. The forum brought together people already investing in Vietnam, individuals considering future participation, government representatives, founders, financial professionals, and organizations involved in building the new ecosystem. The immediate discussions may not resolve every institutional question, but they create opportunities for people to hear one another directly.

They also help build a shared narrative about Vietnam’s future.

Jamie hopes Saigon Fintech Capital will become part of that narrative, serving as a recognizable home for fintech development within the Saigon Marina complex. Her comparison with established hubs in London and Singapore reflects an ambition to create more than office space. The goal is to build a center associated with incubation, capital, expertise, and the development of future Vietnamese fintech companies.

Whether this vision succeeds will depend on execution. Buildings can be opened quickly. Communities take longer. A credible hub requires active founders, reliable investors, experienced mentors, regulatory access, and enough successful companies to create momentum.

It also requires talent.

Financial freedom and financial literacy therefore become connected to national competitiveness. Jamie’s statement that Vietnamese people deserve financial freedom is not simply a social aspiration. A population that understands money, digital finance, entrepreneurship, and investment is better positioned to participate in the opportunities created by an expanding financial sector.

The benefits should extend beyond a small group of professionals in major cities. Financial technology has the potential to make services more accessible, reduce costs, simplify transactions, and help individuals manage resources more effectively. Yet access alone does not guarantee empowerment. People must understand the products they use and the risks they accept.

This is why Jamie’s focus on children feels so relevant to the larger national project. Financial centers are often discussed in terms of foreign capital, international firms, and macroeconomic strategy. Those concerns matter, but the future of the system will also be shaped by children who currently believe money lives inside a phone.

If they grow up understanding only how to spend digitally, the technology will have advanced faster than their financial judgment. If they learn to budget, delay gratification, compare value, understand risk, and connect money with responsibility, they may be better prepared to use the tools being built around them.

The international financial center is therefore partly an institutional project and partly an educational one.

Vietnam can attract investors and develop fintech companies, but a mature financial culture also requires households that understand credit, savings, debt, investment, insurance, and long-term planning. It requires people who can participate in the system without becoming vulnerable to every new product or speculative trend.

Jamie’s vision connects these levels in an unusual way. At one end, she is working with financial institutions, investors, founders, and national initiatives. At the other, she is thinking about children learning to choose a toy within a three-pound budget.

The scale is radically different, but the underlying principle is similar.

Financial development depends on making informed choices within real limits.

Governments allocate resources. Investors evaluate risk. Startups decide where to direct capital. Families decide what to spend, save, and postpone. Children learn that the phone may process the payment, but it does not create the money.

Perhaps this is the most valuable connection to emerge from our conversation. The future of finance is often presented as a story of technology: artificial intelligence, blockchain, digital banking, QR payments, tokenization, and international capital. Jamie’s perspective returns the discussion to human behavior.

Finance exists because people make choices.

Technology can make those choices faster, but it cannot automatically make them wiser. A financial center can create opportunity, but individuals still need the knowledge and confidence to participate. A digital account can hold money, but children must still learn what money represents.

Vietnam is moving from being a market that outsiders observe to one in which they increasingly want to participate. That shift creates enormous possibilities, along with serious responsibilities. Institutions must earn trust. Regulators and companies must communicate. Entrepreneurs must build products that solve real problems. Families must prepare children for a financial environment very different from the one their parents inherited.

Jamie’s work occupies an interesting place within that transition. She is helping build an international fintech gateway while also arguing that the next generation should be present, visible, and educated inside the system being created for them.

The financial center may be built in Saigon and Da Nang, but its ultimate value will be measured by what it allows people to do. Can businesses grow? Can founders enter the market more easily? Can families make better decisions? Can children develop healthier financial habits? Can Vietnamese professionals build companies that compete internationally?

Those questions will take years to answer.

For now, the direction is becoming clear. Vietnam is no longer standing quietly at the edge of the global financial conversation. It is attempting to build a place within it, drawing on international experience while developing institutions of its own.

The more interesting question may no longer be why Vietnam matters.

It may be why anyone still believes it can be ignored.