In this paper, we provide an overview of financial development in Vietnam. Particularly, a new approach of this study is to measure financial development through improvements in depth, efficiency and access of the banking system and stock market. Further, the study examines the factors significantly affecting financial development in Vietnam. The data are collected in Vietnam, an emerging country with a limited financial development. We employ the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach, which generates a high reliability and suits data characteristics of emerging countries like Vietnam. We observe that Vietnam’s banking system plays a key role in supplying credits to the economy while the nascent stock market at a limited size shows its potential for a considerable growth in the future. We also find the influential determinants of financial development in Vietnam including real estate market (RE), economic growth (EG), consumer price index (CPI), and global financial crisis (GFC). These findings are essential for Vietnamese authorities in providing practical solutions in order to build a sustainable and synchronous financial development. They are also first empirical evidence relating to an overview of financial development in an emerging country, so they are not only valuable to Vietnam but also crucial to other emerging economies.