Offer suggestions to overcome shortcomings in IT application for the Finance sector

Mr. Dang Duc Mai (center) discussed at the main report session.

Take initiative in IT application

According to Mr.Truong Ba Tuan - Deputy Director of the National Institute for Finance, the Ministry of Finance always takes the initiative in promulgating many programs and plans in order to implement the Government's policies and orientations about the 4th Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0) in the field of finance - budget.

Along with that, many financial and budgetary mechanisms and policies for the development of science and technology, promoting IT application as well as adaptation to IR 4.0 have been issued and implemented. For example, with preferential tariffs and land rents, the government gave preferential tariffs on corporate income tax at the highest level for new investment projects in hi-tech parks; exempting import duty for raw materials and components directly serving the production of IT products, digital content and software; Some goods and services related to science and technology are not subject to value added tax; free of land rent for a definite term or for the duration of operation of technology projects.

Furthermore, Mr. Tuan said that the Ministry of Finance has effectively implemented a number of financial information systems on a large-scale, which play a fundamental role in financial and budgetary operations such as TABMIS, TMS, VNACCS / VCIS, public property management,… The reform and modernization has helped to reduce the number of hours for people and enterprises when implementing procedures, at the same time, helped the Ministry of Finance keep first rank in the ICT Index for six consecutive years (2013-2018).

Although being proactive and active, the shortcomings still exist. Evaluating the shortcomings in the IT application of the finance sector, Mr. Dang Duc Mai - Director of the Financial Informatics and Statistics Department said: Regarding the database, in terms of readiness to handle, readiness for analysis, the database of the industry is still unstructured (paper-based), lots of databases still have not been normalized, some are hard-to-connect to multiple databases and discrete applications. Thus the databases are not meeting requirements in both terms of quality and quantity in order to support in-depth analysis.

For the application, the fact is that some core professional functions are not properly supported by IT applications, while some functions are supported by many different applications, leading to duplication in professional processes.

For the infrastructure, the financial applications run on multiple operating systems, middleware and other databases, so it has made the production environment become more complex, difficult to manage and maintain, not to mention costly investment, because each application needs to run on multiple layers of system software.

With security and information security the need for ensuring information security is for prevention of sabotage, attack, infiltration, and loss of information, has not been properly met for the whole system, from the workstation to the data center.

Computerize the core professional work

To overcome those problems, Mr. Mai proposed 4 solutions to overcome each group of problems.

Firstly, the finance sector needs to have tools in order to enhance the ability to exploit and manage the database, which is a tool for automating data digitization; tools for data normalization; tools for data cleaning and analysis tools, modeling and forecasting.

Secondly, the finance sector needs to develop a number of new applications to support core business functions that have not yet been computerized, and to review existing applications with similar functionality and upgrade their applications. Thus it can meet professional requirements in an overall and effective way.

Thirdly, the finance sector should strengthen the processes as well as physical infrastructure; ensure the safety of information security, especially data leakage protection, preventing attacks, detecting harmful software installation. The finance sector should also strive to achieve ISO 27001 certification for information security and organize a control program for checking system security, rigorously and annually.

Finally, in parallel with the need for accelerating the deployment of cloud computing for the financial sector, it is also necessary to define a list of some combinations of software/technologies that work together, creating a standard platform for applications that can be efficiently operated.

From the perspective of research, Mr. Truong Ba Tuan pointed out 3 main groups of solutions to adapt to IR 4.0. Those include: Exploiting, allocating and utilizing financial resources to promote the development of IR 4.0 elements; effectively apply the achievements of IR 4.0 in the field of finance and budget; step up financial and budgetary mechanisms and policies.