Dunamu hopes to become iTunes in stock trading market

Dunamu Chief Executive Song Chi-hyung, left, with director Kim Hyoung-nyon at the company’s building in Seoul during a recent interview. / Courtesy of Dunamu

By Bahk Eun-ji

Stock Plus for Kakao is a social trading site linked to social networking services (SNS). The mobile application was launched in keeping with the changing trends in stock trading.

Until recently, home trading allowed customers to trade stocks using their desktop computers, but with the rapid growth of smartphone users, mobile trading ― which allows users to trade stocks anywhere ― has become an emerging trend.

Among several mobile stock trading apps, Stock Plus for Kakao, offered by Dunamu, is an SNS-based program. KakaoTalk users can download the Stock Plus for Kakao mobile app to receive regular pop-up messages or push alarms with information or statistics on their bookmarked companies. It also provides business news articles, regulatory filings, real-time prices and charts from the stock and bond markets. Among the various features, its ranking service is different from other similar apps.

“The ranking service shows details of trading and investment strategies of the users in the order of the highest rates of return during the week,” said Song Chi-hyung, CEO of Dunamu.

Song said he believes credibility is the most important quality in the stock trading service.

“The ranking is based on our users’ actual transactions,” he said. “We think it is one of the most trustworthy ways to raise credibility.”

The CEO said people usually exchange investment information individually on the Internet.

“The problem with those kinds of closed ways is there is no one to take responsibility, even if they share false information,” he said.

Song said the service has received positive reviews from users, as it is an SNS-based system. People using SNS usually have a desire to show themselves, and Stock Plus Kakao satisfies their desires by letting them show off their achievements to their followers.

Users can get high reliability by showing them their earning rates over time. Users can check how the price-ratio has changed through a chart the service offers.

Dunamu even offers cash rewards to those users who take the top rankings ― 500,000 won for first place, 200,000 won for second and 100,000 won for third.

The CEO said he believes it is the best way to encourage people to use the service more actively and raise its credibility at the same time. The app was officially launched in February 2014, and more than 550,000 Android users have downloaded it. It generates 23 million page views a day.

Song said his goal is to make the service like Apple iTunes for the stock-trading market.

“Every user of Apple’s smart device manages their media content, such as music and videos ― and they even purchase them through iTunes,” he said. “We hope our service will become the strongest platform so that all information related to stock trade goes through Stock Plus for Kakao in the future.”