Zalopay Brand Guidelines: VNG’s Payment App, Zalo Chat & a Lowercase p

A payment app named after a chat app.

Zalopay is the payment app of VNG, the Ho Chi Minh City technology company founded on 9 September 2004 as VinaGame, English Wikipedia says, and known for online games, the Zing MP3 music service and the messaging app Zalo. English Wikipedia dates the launch of Zalopay to 2016; in July 2026 the business paper Doanh nhân, published by Báo Pháp luật, described it as ten years into its operation.

The name comes from Zalo. Zalo itself, English Wikipedia says, joins Zing, VNG’s web brand, with “alo,” the word Vietnamese speakers use to answer the phone; it was released in test form in August 2012 and officially in December 2012. Payment sits inside that chat world: Zalo’s feature list includes mobile payment through Zalopay, and Zalopay’s website lists free money transfers through Zalo chat among its services.

The app is run by a separate company. Zalopay’s press releases and website name ZION Joint Stock Company, Công ty Cổ phần ZION, as its developer, licensed by the State Bank of Vietnam for payment intermediary services; the licence shown on its website, dated 19 January 2026, covers an electronic payment gateway, collection and payment support and an e-wallet. VNG already had payment experience. English Wikipedia says it created the 123Pay platform in 2010, built on ZingPay, which had served its online games since 2005.

The chat app gives the wallet its reach. English Wikipedia reports that Zalo had about 82.6 million monthly active users in the third quarter of 2026, and cites a Decision Lab report from the second quarter of 2026 in which about 81% of Vietnamese people were said to use the app. VNG took its present name in 2008–09, and English Wikipedia quotes The ASEAN Post calling it “Vietnam’s first ever unicorn start-up.”

Zalopay remains central to the group. In July 2026 Doanh nhân called it one of the four main businesses of what it named VNG Group, and reported that VNG’s 2026 shareholder meeting named Zalopay, Zalo and VNGGames as its key platforms.

From wallet to payment platform.

Zalopay has spent recent years moving away from the closed wallet model. In a press release of 2 July 2024, its chief executive, Lê Lan Chi, said that from the end of 2023 the aim had been to grow Zalopay into a payment platform, “breaking away from the traditional e-wallet model.” The first step, the company says, came in July 2023, when it worked with Napas, Vietnam’s national payment network, on Zalopay QR Đa Năng, a multi-purpose QR code that accepts payment from any banking app or e-wallet. It then added payment by banking apps, international and ATM cards and Apple Pay, and launched Zalopay Priority, a rewards programme for payments made from any bank app.

The company gives its own scale. In July 2024 it said it served more than 14 million users with more than 100 services, and listed six financial products, from savings and share investing to small consumer loans. In July 2026 Doanh nhân reported more than 22 million users, more than 86,000 partners and more than 200,000 payment points across the country, and said that in 2025 Zalopay began cross-border payments for Vietnamese users in markets including China, Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Malaysia.

Its recognition is from industry rankings. Doanh nhân reported that CNBC and Statista included Zalopay in their World’s Top Fintech Companies 2026 list, published on 22 July 2026, in the payments category, its second appearance after 2023. The company says QR Đa Năng was named a “Product of the year” in a 2024 top-100 list of innovative products compiled by the newspaper Báo Đầu tư with Viet Research.

Wallets, QR codes and super-apps.

Asian e-wallets and payment apps tend to present themselves first through a small square: the app icon. Bright blues, greens, pinks, purples and oranges are common choices, often with a single letter or a short word set in a rounded sans, because the icon has to be found quickly on a crowded phone screen and read at the size of a fingertip. The same colour usually carries through to buttons, cards and the bar at the top of the home screen.

The QR code is the other recurring image. Many wallets grew up around scanning a printed code at a shop counter, and national standards such as QRIS in Indonesia and QR Ph in the Philippines mean one code can often be read by several apps. Marketing pages show phones held over codes, stickers on stall fronts and receipts on screen, so the payment itself becomes part of the identity.

Names and taglines often lean on the local language and on everyday speech. Product families frequently share a prefix or a letter, so that savings, credit, insurance and investment features read as parts of one app. Promotions bring their own visual layer: cashback badges, countdown timers, vouchers and, for some brands, mascots or illustrated characters that soften a financial product.

Behind the consumer screens sit two other audiences. Websites usually divide into pages on transfers, bills, mobile top-ups, micro-loans and pay-later credit for users, and pages on QR acceptance, payouts and point-of-sale tools for merchants. A third layer of newsroom, regulatory and investor pages has grown as several of these companies have joined stock exchanges, and those pages tend to use a quieter version of the same palette.

A lowercase p and an open outline.

The identity changed on 2 July 2024, at an event called “Mở giới hạn. Mới trải nghiệm,” roughly “Open the limits, new experiences.” The company says the new mark was researched and designed entirely by its own staff. The logo left behind its closed outline blocks for two bright tones of xanh, the Vietnamese word that covers both blue and green, and the “P” became lowercase, so that the name now reads Zalopay rather than ZaloPay; older pages and the website footer still use the earlier form. The idea behind the change was put as “Zalopay changes so that users do not have to change.”

Unusually for the category, Zalopay publishes a brand-use page. Its “Hướng dẫn sử dụng thương hiệu,” or brand usage guide, offers downloads of the logo as a PNG and an Illustrator file, a Zalopay font and a brand guideline PDF, and asks partners to use them as the guide sets out. The website now titles the service “Ứng dụng thanh toán tích thưởng,” a payment app with rewards.

For a design guide, Zalopay shows how a payment brand can lighten its mark by opening its outline and lowering one letter. Compare MoMo, the other big Ho Chi Minh City e-wallet, and WeChat, the Chinese messaging app. For this guide we use an ocean blue and a fresh green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Zalopay’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.