Having spent his high school years in Vietnam, Mads Werner quickly adapted to the local culture and developed a deep affection for the country. Even after returning to his native Denmark for university and work, Vietnam remained close to his heart.
In 2018, Mads made the decision to return and settle in Vietnam, where he founded Ecotek — a technology consulting and software outsourcing company. In 2022, he launched Ekko, a fintech application that enables users to access their earned wages flexibly.
Just ahead of the upcoming 2025 Vietnam ESG Investor Conference, the Vietnam Innovators Digest team had the opportunity to speak with Mads Werner. The Ekko founder shared challenges and opportunities throughout his journey building Ekko, along with his experience at the Vietnam ESG Investor Conference — where building strong partnerships and resilient systems for sustainable finance and ESG investing in Vietnam.
Why did you name your business Ekko? Is there a meaning behind it?
As you probably guessed, “Ekko” comes from the word echo — a concept where something returns after it’s sent out. In the same way, we see that earned wages should come back to workers as soon as they’ve done the work.
If you look at our logo, you’ll notice the ‘K’ wrapping around the ‘O’ — a reminder that our role is to support and care for the workforce at the heart of everything we do and follow our most important core value, vị nhân sinh (humanity).
Can you explain how Ekko works to a 15-year-old?
Let's say you just finished a long shift at KOI Thé and it’s the last week of the month. You’ve earned your money - but you won’t be seeing it before the end of the month. That’s just how payroll has worked for a long time. With Ekko, that unnecessary waiting ends.
Need cash for a last-minute date gift? Finish your shift, open Ekko’s app, and just like that — 30 seconds later, your wages are in your account. No waiting. No asking for approval. Behind the scenes, we work directly with your employer to make that magic happen - seamlessly and securely.
What was the motivation for you to start Ekko?
I suppose it started personally. I have witnessed someone I knew spiraled into severe debt with extremely high interest rates, all while facing a series of unfortunate events. These are all events that didn’t need to happen, because it all started with just a 6–7 million VND loan!! That experience stuck with me, and over time, I’ve come to realize that there’s still a long way to go when it comes to both financial literacy and accessibility for many in Vietnam.
Financial literacy is about building simple habits — knowing how to manage your money, plan for the month, set aside around 20% of your income for savings, and most importantly, understanding the risks of credit. Financial accessibility is about giving people safe, fast, and transparent financial tools so they don’t have to turn to unofficial payday lenders with enormous interest rates.
This challenge can be tackled in close collaboration with companies, who have a trusted relationship with their employees. Our very first client, Ecopark, had 1,000 workers and a clear desire to do more for their employees. That was the beginning of Ekko — and the feedback we received was instant and overwhelming. From that moment on, every transaction on our platform felt like more than just a feature — it felt like purpose to me. And that’s when our vision was born.
What are the opportunities and challenges operating Ekko, both internally and externally?
Vietnam has a large emerging market with more than 50 million workers, many of whom are underserved by traditional financial institutions. At the same time smartphone adoption has been growing significantly and companies have been focusing more and more on digitally transforming their operations. All of these variables together have become an opportunity for us, giving us access to provide what we do to many workers at scale.
However, as with any new market, there’s a significant need for education. From my observation so far, many company leaders aren’t yet focused on financial wellness as a core employee benefit. Beyond salary, there’s so much more that can be done. Showing how giving employees fast, secure access to earned wages can boost engagement, reduce absenteeism, and increase loyalty. And it works. Sometimes all it takes is a simple staff survey — once the leadership and HR departments see how many of their people are financially stressed, the benefit becomes very clear.
From an internal perspective, payroll practices in Vietnam are quite diverse. Many companies still rely on manual processes, such as managing payroll with Excel spreadsheets, which can present challenges in terms of efficiency and accuracy. We’ve tried to build Ekko to be highly adaptable, so our solution can work with companies of all sizes and levels of technological readiness. Initially, we focused on businesses where we could directly integrate with their payroll and timekeeping systems, allowing us to track attendance and working hours in real time. Today, we can accommodate most businesses, ensuring that even those with less advanced systems can still provide their employees with the financial flexibility they need.
How does Ekko ensure transparency, ethical decision-making, and compliance with local and international business regulations?
At Ekko, transparency is central to everything we do — from data privacy to our product design. Our fee structure is straightforward, with no hidden charges. In traditional finance, many users struggle to understand complex loan terms, interest rates, or late fees. We’ve built Ekko to be simple and easy to understand, reinforcing ethical decision-making.
We also work closely with the HR to determine appropriate access limits — often recommending a cap of 50–60% of accrued wages rather than 100%, to encourage responsible use.
To further support ethical use, we recently introduced a feature that helps HR teams identify employees who frequently request advances. This isn’t about restriction — it’s about early detection of financial stress. From there, we can offer targeted financial literacy support to help employees better manage money and avoid deeper financial issues.
Fintech platforms handle sensitive financial data. What governance frameworks does Ekko have in place to ensure data security and consumer protection?
One of the standards we are compliant with is ISO 27001 — the global standard for information security management. It provides us a framework for managing user data, detailing the procedures followed by our tech team specifically, and the entire organization more broadly, for handling, storing, and securing information. All sensitive data on our platform is encrypted, ensuring that even in the event of a cyberattack, the information remains unreadable without the proper decryption keys.
We follow Decree 13 on personal data protection - to ensure that our users’ privacy and data protection are never compromised. And most importantly, at the end of every year, we conduct annual penetration testing with third party vendors to proactively identify and fix potential vulnerabilities before they become threats. This helps set our security priortiies for the year ahead.
From Ekko’s success story, what is your advice for other SMEs on balancing ESG commitments with their budget and scale?
I would not call us success yet, but we are trying our best to make a difference every single day. However, I can share what we did and hope it can help others who want to apply ESG practices.
I do remember in our first year, I tried taking an ESG score assessment online, and it felt super demotivating. Especially as a startup, when you’re already focused on staying lean, growing the business, and juggling a 100s of moving parts.
ESG can feel abstract, too large, and not worth focusing on. If you're a factory exporting to Europe, reducing your carbon footprint might be a competitive advantage — even a revenue driver. But what if you're a service-based SME with limited resources? Where do you even begin?
For us, we realized we can’t do everything at once — and we shouldn’t. What matters is taking small, steady steps and committing to meaningful progress each year. When we do our annual OKR’s at the beginning of the year we have one section set out for this. At Ekko, governance has always been at the core and that’s where we focus our energy.
As an example, in the past year, we’ve taken several concrete steps to raise the bar on implementing ISO 27001 standards and build full audit trails across our platform down to the smallest detail. On the social side of ESG we have a budget and set of activities set out every year that we follow.
ESG also doesn’t have to be complex and each SME will have different ESG strategies and priorities differently, depending on the nature of their operations. For example, if you are a coffee shop owner producing daily waste, you can start by implementing proper waste segregation. If you are an owner of an IT company, on the other hand, you might focus on energy efficiency by moving your servers to a cloud provider powered by renewable energy.
My employees are at the core of everything we do. And reflecting back on the last few years, I see that the activities we do, trying to be a more sustainable business - they also deepen the engagement and loyalty within the team.
What are your key takeaways from participating in the 2024 Vietnam ESG Investor Conference? What are your expectations for this year?
We were very lucky to take part in a startup pitching competition and were fortunate to present our idea to several impact-driven venture capital firms. That opportunity ultimately led to an investment in our company, which has helped us tremendously since then!
I’ve been to lots of events and the Vietnam ESG Investor Conference is one of the highest quality platforms for engaging with investors, businesses, and individuals who are truly committed to social and environmental impact. For me, the network you can get from the conference with likeminded people has been the most valuable to me and is still today!
With the recent changes in global trade dynamics and new and current geopolitics impacting Vietnam, there will be significant effects on the country’s supply chain and manufacturing sectors. I’m looking forward to hearing from business leaders about how they tackle these challenges to understand better how we can also adapt to the changes.
The 2025 Vietnam ESG Investor Conference by Raise Partners and Vietnam Innovators Digest is a two-day event, gathering investors and funds, business leaders, Vietnamese and international governments, start-ups, experts, academia, and the media to spark meaningful collaboration and accelerate green and inclusive growth in Vietnam.
When: 8:00 AM - 4:30 PM, 14-15th May 2025
Where: New World Saigon Hotel, 76 Le Lai Street, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City
Event details: find out more HERE
The 2025 Vietnam ESG Investor Conference is made possible with the support of: Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Leading Government Partner); Dynam Capital and Ecolean (Program Partner); New World Saigon Hotel (Venue Partner); HSBC Vietnam, S&P Global, DEEP C Industrial Zones, Betrimex, Home Credit (Engagement Partner); Vietcetera (Media Partner); AusCham Vietnam and Dutch Business Association Vietnam (Communications Partner); Green Transition (Technical Partner) and Be (Travel Partner).