Vietnam has to find $200 billion to fund its ambitious growth agenda. Techcombank’s CEO thinks that has to come from overseas

When Techcombank CEO Jens Lottner looks at Vietnam’s growth ambitions, he sees a simple mismatch: big plans, not enough money. 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 ne