Vietnam and Austria are deepening practical cooperation on financial-market supervision, with digital assets at the center of the conversation. On September 15 in Vienna, Vietnamese Deputy Minister of Finance Nguyen Duc Chi met Mariana Kühnel, the newly appointed executive director of Austria’s Financial Market Authority (FMA).
Officials from Vietnam’s State Securities Commission (SSC), the Ministry of Finance, and related market institutions joined the session, which mixed experience-sharing with a search for concrete channels of future work.
Chi welcomed Austria’s account of how it has updated supervision as technology and new asset classes have arrived.
The discussion then turned to crypto-assets. Vietnam, he said, already has a pilot legal framework in place and expects the first licensed crypto-asset service providers to begin operating in 2026.
That target is an official expectation under the pilot, not a claim that licenses have already been issued.
SSC Chairwoman Vu Thi Chan Phuong described the next layer of work: a supervisory mechanism covering both service providers and investor transactions.
The said design now reportedly draws on Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendations and puts weight on risk management, protection of client assets, and anti-money-laundering controls.
Vietnam also wants to study how the FMA and other European Union authorities have handled similar issues while it finishes its own rulebook.
Kühnel placed Austria’s role in context.
Many of the rules that matter for financial markets are set at EU level; the FMA implements them at home and supervises banks, insurers, pension funds, securities firms, exchanges, investment funds, and crypto-asset service providers.
She suggested the two sides use the International Organization of Securities Commissions as a standing forum and hold online technical meetings so specialists can compare notes on shared problems.
Chi endorsed that approach, saying structured channels would turn general exchange into usable technical support.
The meeting was not limited to digital assets.
Officials also discussed capital market development, including support for small and medium-sized enterprises, which account for the vast majority of
Vietnamese firms, and efforts to raise listing quality, disclosure standards, and surveillance against manipulation.
The broader theme was how regulators keep pace with innovation without leaving investors or the financial system exposed.Austria’s FMA, created in 2002 as an integrated supervisor, is a useful counterpart precisely because it already oversees crypto-asset service providers under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework.
Vietnam is building a domestic pilot rather than copying that regime wholesale.
The value of the contact is therefore comparative: how another jurisdiction organizes licensing, ongoing supervision, investor-asset safeguards, and AML controls while markets move quickly.
No formal memorandum of understanding was announced.
What was agreed is more modest and more operational—regular expert dialogue through IOSCO and remote technical sessions.
For a country preparing to license its first crypto intermediaries, that kind of peer exchange can shorten the distance between a pilot statute and a working supervisory practice.
It remains to be see now if 2026 delivers the first licenses.
It will probably depend on how quickly Vietnam turns the remaining operational rules into enforceable standards. The Vienna meeting at least puts that work in conversation with a European supervisor that already lives with those problems every day.