Asia-Pacific Power List 2025: Thai Minh Diem Tu, Techcombank

Thai Minh Diem Tu

Chief marketing officer
Techcombank
Vietnam 
Member since 2024  

As chief marketer at one of Vietnam’s leading banks for nearly five years, Thai Minh Diem Tu has collected a string of feats to her name. Under its ‘Be Greater’ brand positioning, Techcombank’s brand equity index increased by a whopping 61% in 2024 according to NielsenIQ, the highest of any Vietnamese bank and overtaking other large government-owned banks in the nation. Its net promoter score reached 91 in the last quarter, and its top-of-mind score increased to 22% in 2024 from 15% the year before. 

A huge contributor to those numbers was the bank’s ‘Your Own Greatness Starts Today’ campaign which was delivered through a series of purpose-led initiatives. One of them was an AI song-generator for customers to create personalised songs to celebrate ‘their own greatness’. The generator created some 40,000 songs by the end of 2024 and the campaign was brought to a crescendo with an original song by popular local musicians Soobin, Rhymastic and Slim V.  The song reached seven million views on YouTube within its first two weeks of release. 

Last year, Tu’s team also put out two inaugural flagship events, one of which was the first-ever Techcombank Keynote to showcase the bank’s product innovations and applications of data and AI for the benefits of customers and stakeholders. Meanwhile, the first edition of its Vietnam Investment Summit aimed to shine a light on Vietnam’s developing economy for the wider business and investment community. These efforts and more managed to drive a huge spike in customer numbers, with 4.5 million new sign-ups last year for a total of over 15 million. 

As part of Techcombank’s ESG efforts, Tu leads two city marathons in Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi where over 30,000 runners participated last year. On the back of the marathons’ success, Tu envisions an official city marathon in Ho Chi Minh in the future that would be branded a world-class sporting event comparable to the full marathons in Singapore, Tokyo, New York, and Sydney. She hopes that an official marathon would also aid in putting Vietnam on the global map and attract visitors from the world over to participate. 

Continuing her ESG initiatives, Tu helped to launch the bank’s Winter Giving programme to educate employees about how to live more sustainably. Over the course of the campaign, VND$2.6 billion ($100,163) was raised by employees to fund local social initiatives. They also partnered with a local conservation centre to launch a tree-planting project with the goal of planting a billion new trees across the country within four years. Additionally, Tu is committed to DEI within her organisation and has played a part in ensuring that women make up some 61% of managerial positions.