Shinhan goes all out for big data business

Shinhan Bank Deputy President Lee Myong-goo, center, LG U+ Vice President Lee Sang-min, left, and CJ OliveNetworks managing director Nam Byung-soo hold a memorandum of understanding at LG Sciencepark in Seoul, Thursday. / Courtesy of Shinhan Bank

Bank joins hands with LG, CJ

By Park Jae-hyuk

Shinhan Financial Group subsidiaries are rapidly expanding their presences in the big data business, in line with the nation's efforts to boost the data economy as part of the Korean New Deal project that was initiated to seek future growth engines.

On Sunday, Shinhan Bank said it signed a memorandum of understanding with LG U+ and CJ OliveNetworks to jointly push ahead with the big data business.

The three companies agreed to collect more valuable data and take preemptive measures against the new market through the convergence of their data. They plan to cooperate with each other to share and converge their data, carry out joint marketing campaigns and seek new business opportunities using data.

Their first collaboration will focus on data on spending habits of residents in districts of Seoul. This is expected to help categorizing similar districts, profiling residents of specific areas and analyzing their spending habits.

In addition to this, data collected by the three companies will be traded via the Financial Data Exchange and the Data Store run by the Korea Data Agency.

“We expect to offer new information to consumers and develop new business models by converging each company's data,” Shinhan Bank Deputy President Lee Myong-goo said. “In line with the changing trend, we will jointly make efforts to come up with meaningful data.”

Shinhan Card recently held a briefing session for its employees to use pseudonymous data properly.

After listening to a lecture by a Financial Security Institute official on the legal definition of pseudonymous data and procedure to converge data between different companies, the employees had a question and answer session to discuss ways to develop new services using such data.

In March, Shinhan Financial Group Chairman Cho Yong-byoung introduced a system under which CEOs of the group subsidiaries will play a leading role in incorporating key technologies into their digital transformation processes.

Under the system, Shinhan Card CEO Lim Young-jin has been tasked to direct the group's big data business.

Shinhan Bank and Shinhan Card are also supplying financial data they have to the Financial Data Exchange that opened in May.