Lee Min-hyung joined The Korea Times in 2014 and has worked as a journalist mainly in Korea’s finance, tech and automotive industry. He specializes in content creation, breaking news and in-depth analysis currently on transportation and mobility. You can reach him via mhlee@koreatimes.co.kr.
'Self-learning bot will drive digitization of BC Card'
By Lee Min-hyung
By Lee Min-hyung
Won Sang-hun, head of digital lab at BC Card
In a period of low growth and weak domestic consumption, card companies are busy finding the next cash cow and realigning their business structures in the face of looming challenges amid a dismal outlook for a short-term economic rebound here. A range of statistics data has also added to concerns that the Korean economy will continue to suffer from setbacks for the near future.
Some local credit card issuers are also making rapid inroads into overseas territories to expand their revenue streams and brace for the worst-case scenario from the local economic downturn and ever-toughening market competition.
Despite the pessimistic signal for growth, BC Card is going all-out to overcome the lingering concerns by incorporating technologies into their services. The company believes it can find “something new” there, even if the approach appears to be unoriginal.
Won Sang-hun, head of BC Card's digital lab unit, remains optimistic over the firm's growth potential, saying its ongoing digital transformation will create much more business opportunities down the road. BC Card is the nation's biggest payment processor.
“Card companies cover about 90 percent of the nation's private consumption, and they are capable of running stable payment infrastructures as well as utilizing big data that comes from the massive payment datasets,” Won said in an interview, Dec. 4.
He said the company is particularly focused on making a breakthrough in the saturated card industry by using emerging digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data processing software, for innovating the firm's services and enhancing its work efficiency.
The firm's digital research center ― led by Won ― consists of 15 employees. They focus their research on developing business models by taking advantage of technologies, such as AI and robotic process automation (RPA), according to the head researcher.
RPA means a software robot developed to handle repetitive tasks in the workplace.
RPA is not an up-to-date technology, with a number of big companies applying the software bot to their daily tasks.
But BC Card was one of the first movers in introducing RPA among local card companies.
“BC Card started running a pilot RPA service in 2017 to streamline work processes,” Won said. “We have since applied RPA to about 60 categories of work. The robot annually replaces 30,000 hours of work previously done by human beings.”
The company was able to cut business processing time in those areas by 94 percent after introducing the bot, according to him.
“Employees also were able to shift their focus to something more meaningful, rather than spending their time in managing tedious and repetitive works, such as credit card sales slip processing.”
It took more than 2,000 hours a year for people to complete the work, but the RPA can manage it in less than 10 hours, claims Won.
The company plans to further expand RPA usage into broader areas in the company next year.
“We are planning to establish a process management system which will monitor, schedule and manage overall work done by RPA in a detailed manner,” he said.
The head of the digital center also said the company would generate synergies by integrating RPA with the AI.
“Our short-term technological goal is to build a successful AI-powered RPA bot for its wider and advanced level of usage in work,” he said.
“As of now, RPA is only on the level of carrying out tasks according to orders fixed by human beings. But we expect an AI-driven RPA to provide each customer with individualized marketing information.”
He also said RPA with self-learning algorithms can also be used to analyze spending trends from customers in real-time and helping the firm retain loyal customers.
As the AI technology is still in its infancy, there is enough room for growth in the area, Won says.
“In a hyper-connected digital world, the potential of such emerging technologies is infinite,” he said. “The key lies in how to fine-tune existing ones in a more innovative way.
Aside from expanding revenue streams, the company also hopes to use the AI to enhance its security and prevent customers from falling victim to fraud.
“We introduced the fraud detection system (FDS) by utilizing our neural network algorithm,” he said.
FDS allows the company to keep track of suspicious transaction information in real-time here and abroad. The AI-driven system can learn the latest financial crime trends by itself, helping the company take a pre-emptive steps to prevent credit card-related crimes.
“Even if AI technology started gaining global attention after the historic go match between Google's AlphaGo software and human go champion Lee Se-dol, we already started introducing such an AI-powered FDS system in 1997.”