Meritz bets on AI app to win retail investors
[INTERVIEW]
Once considered a small segment of the brokerage business, retail investors are now reshaping the industry's priorities. As their collective voice on online communities and social media gains the power to sway markets, firms are scrambling to retain them with proprietary, AI-driven platforms that combine investment information with global investor sentiment, allowing users to expand their investment perspectives beyond borders.
At the forefront is Meritz Securities. Traditionally renowned for its strength in investment banking and real estate finance, the brokerage is expanding its focus on retail investors through MOUM, an AI-powered investment platform scheduled to launch in September.
The platform will combine trading, personalized information services and investment communities, allowing users to share insights on Korean and global stocks. Through a partnership with U.S. digital investment platform Webull, discussions and market perspectives from investors across markets will be available in real time, with AI-powered translation eliminating language barriers.
Foreign investors will also be able to trade Korean stocks through Meritz on Webull's brokerage app as part of the omnibus account featured on MOUM. The account enables nonresidents to trade Korean equities through overseas brokerages, forgoing the need to open separate accounts with local securities firms.
“Investment culture has changed significantly as the market evolves, with younger investors increasingly relying on AI for information,” said Lee Jang-wook, executive managing director at Meritz Securities’ InnoBiz Division during an interview at the company headquarters in Yeouido, western Seoul, on May 29.
“As AI-generated content becomes more common, data has become more important. AI can provide the same news and market data across platforms, but differentiation increasingly comes from user behavior. By tracking user activity within a platform, it’s possible to see which content is being consumed and to analyze investor preferences. Those insights are primarily found within community-based platforms,” Lee added.
The trend is reflected in the numbers. The number of customers using robo-advisors offered by firms certified through the government-backed Robo Advisor Test Bed Center reached 177,659 as of March, up 5.5 percent from a year earlier. Assets under management also rose 5.6 percent over the same period to 642.5 billion won ($430 million).
Before the app's launch, Meritz Securities strengthened its retail business by introducing a zero-commission promotion for domestic and overseas stock trading accounts in November 2024 to attract investors. As a result, its retail client base jumped 120 percent, from 196,000 at the end of 2024 to 432,000 at the end of last year.
Below are the edited excerpts from the interview held ahead of the platform’s scheduled launch in September.
Meritz Securities is a brokerage firm best known for its investment banking and real estate finance businesses. What prompted the decision to launch a platform targeting retail investors?
Retail clients are very important, and without developing that side of the business, it is difficult to move toward becoming a comprehensive financial firm. The platform is built around investment communities and AI, with a longer-term goal of creating an agentic, AI-friendly environment that makes AI tools more intuitive and accessible for users.
AI functionality will depend on data, including traditional financial inputs such as market information, corporate disclosures and sector-specific data, as well as user-generated content. As a result, the platform will place particular emphasis on activating investment communities and collecting behavioral and discussion data, which will be integrated into its AI systems to enhance functionality and personalization.
You mentioned that AI is a key component of this platform. What AI features will be included?
The platform will embed five core AI functions designed to support the full investment workflow. At the front end, a translation AI will enable seamless interaction with overseas investment communities, helping users process and contextualize foreign-language content in real time while also communicating with one another. This is complemented by a content engine that aggregates and summarizes multiple sources into consolidated insights. The system will also include an alert function that proactively surfaces corporate events, such as disclosures, for stocks that users hold or track.
In addition, a finance-specific large language model is being developed to provide more tailored investment intelligence. Looking ahead, the platform aims to build agentic AI capabilities using AWS’s Amazon Bedrock, with models such as Claude and Gemini serving as the underlying foundation.
What approach will the platform take to overseas expansion?
There are two strategies. The first is to partner with established overseas platforms that already have strong user bases, and run a brokerage business for Korean equities through those platforms. Plans are underway to build a Korean service within the Webull platform.
The second is to take the company’s own platform overseas by localizing it through language adaptation. Since the platform is cloud-based, there is no need to build new server infrastructure. In principle, it can be rolled out by changing languages and then obtaining the necessary local licenses.
How do you see securities platforms evolving going forward?
Today, the user experience is still relatively manual. At present, short-term traders typically have to input and analyze their own investment style manually. But that era is likely to fade, as AI will increasingly be able to assess an investor’s risk profile and trading behavior — for example, determining at what loss level they tend to cut positions and alerting them when that threshold is reached. Further down the line, AI could potentially make those stop-loss decisions automatically.
In addition, such systems could break down an investor’s overall portfolio — identifying, for instance, how much is allocated to short-term trading — and surface not only positive sentiment around a stock, but also negative discussions accumulated within communities. Preparing for these services will require extensive data accumulation from the outset.
BY JIN MIN-JI [jin.minji@joongang.co.kr]
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