Billing for MyData data transmission meets opposition in Korea

[Image source: Gettyimagesbank]

Data providers for South Korea’s MyData services are seeking to bill the service operators for data collection due to mounting costs to manage surging data transmission, but the idea immediately met strong opposition from MyData operators.

MyData, officially launched in Korea in January, allows accredited MyData operators such as fintech companies to manage personal information scattered across financial, telecommunication, medical and public sectors. Financial companies including banks, securities firms and credit card issuers are main related information providers in Korea.

Currently, there are about 600 information providers and 53 companies licensed as MyData operators. Four big tech firms (Toss, Naver Financial, Kakao Pay and Banksalad) control more than 70 percent of the local MyData market.

Under the MyData scheme, information providers send customer data weekly or irregularly. For irregular transmission, information is updated in real time when customers log in to or refresh the app. The current rule stipulates that minimum charges are possible only for regular data transmissions with implementation suspended for one year.

According to sources on Thursday, free of charge irregular data transmissions account for nearly 90 percent of total MyData transfers.

[Image source: MyData]

As of September, the cumulative number of MyData subscribers came to 54.8 million, a 3.9-fold increase from 14 million in January when the service was launched. The number of MyData transfers also skyrocketed over the same period, with the total number of cumulative transmissions jumping 12.3 times from 8.5 billion in January to 104.8 billion at the end of September, most of which are irregular transmissions exempt from billing.

The government stipulates regular transmission to ensure information accuracy, but it is natural that irregular transmission increases due to the nature of MyData services, where real-time asset management is the key, said a market official.

Financial institutions are facing growing financial burden from surging irregular transmission because there is no technical way to compensate for the costs incurred from irregular data transmission while they need to make massive investment in building and operating an information transmission system.

To compensate the growing costs, they have requested the stakeholders to start reviewing ways to bill for data transmission - both regular and irregular.

Fintech companies, however, argue that the government’s original plan to guarantee a minimum payment for regular transmission should remain intact, saying that only a small number of information providers may monopolize the data when they charge for every information transmission.

The government recently completed a commissioned study to provide a reasonable billing system related to MyData transmission before the end of this year. A meeting for industry feedback is due to be held soon.