Manpower essential for Shinhan's digitization

Shinhan Financial Group Chairman Cho Yong-byoung, third from right, applauds with the group's digital experts, during the opening ceremony of Shinhan Digital Campus in Shinhan L Tower in Seoul in this March 2018 file photo. / Courtesy of Shinhan Financial Group

Banking group trains 27,000 employees as 'digital warriors'

This is the fourth in a series of articles highlighting major financial groups' strategies for digital transformation. ― ED.

By Park Jae-hyuk

A company's digital transformation is often regarded as a business strategy that destroys jobs, as it allows the company to operate with fewer employees.

Shinhan Financial Group, however, may be proof that such a common belief is not always true.

The country's leading banking group, which has aggressively pushed ahead with digitization to be Asia's leading financial firm, said its digital transformation strategy is "people-oriented."

"The core of our digital transformation is our customers and employees, not digital technology," Shinhan Financial Group Chairman Cho Yong-byoung said. "People should be at the center of the digital transformation."

The chairman also emphasized that skilled employees are the source of the group's digitization.

"Nurturing digital skills is important for us to be Asia's leading financial group until 2020," he said. "We will therefore invest in various education programs to train all of our employees as digital warriors."

In April 2017, the group signed an agreement with Korea University to open the nation's first master's course in digital financial engineering, with the aim of improving its employees' capability in handling digital technologies.

For this course, the university hired faculty in various majors and private experts from various fields.

Shinhan selected 30 employees for the course among 540 applicants.

They graduated in August after finishing the four-semester course.

During a presentation of their graduation projects July 12, they proposed various technologies for the company, including an autocomplete feature for chatbot, which is based on big data analysis of call center consulting.

Shinhan said it will continue the education program and hire experts outside the company, so as to increase the number of its digital and ICT experts to 2,300 by the end of 2020.

It will open an online course as well, for all its 27,000 employees to learn the latest digital technologies and trends, whenever and wherever they are.

According to the group, its budget for digital education has also been boosted to achieve this goal.

"We are switching to digital from analogue by offering digital education and encouraging our employees to set up in-house ventures," a Shinhan Financial Group official said. "We are also pushing ahead with innovation in our corporate culture to be tolerant of failure."

In March 2018, Shinhan opened Shinhan Digital Campus, so that its 140 digital experts could study new technologies and create innovative services for customers.

Shinhan Digital Innovation Institute in the campus has conducted research on artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, open innovation, digital experience and big data.

A paper titled, "Feature Generation Using Machine Learning from Large Sparse Financial Data," written by researcher Choi Min-jung of the group's integrated R&D center, was even introduced to global experts at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) 2019, which was held in Cancun, Mexico, from Aug. 15 to 19.

Shinhan said its skilled experts have led the group to build the first cloud strategy in the nation's financial sector and create a transformation roadmap.

They also help Shinhan subsidiaries use digital marketing tools such as Google Assistant 360.

"We can proudly say that we are the industry leader in terms of digital transformation," the official said.

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