Prioritizing customer-centric digital finance innovation

Hana Financial Group Ham Young-joo speaks during a meeting with the banking group's senior officials. (Hana Financial Group)

Morphing into a customer-centered financial platform company through open digital innovation, fostering digital talent and strengthening technological capabilities is one of the key strategies Hana Financial Group pushes forward.

Based on big data, the banking group is developing products and services tailored to customer groups while converting offline branches into financial platforms where customers can satisfy their needs through human touch.

The digital channel plays the role of an all-in-one financial platform that can sell complex financial products, and the in-person channel serves as a point of contact for customer experience that provides a rich and professional experience at the branch.

“We seek to establish a customer-oriented digital financial ecosystem and secure leadership in the ecosystem change through strategic investment and partnership on mobile financial platforms,” a group official said.

The group has continued to upgrade and expand its integrated payment platforms, enabling customers to make payments through their accounts, credit and debit cards here and abroad.

It seeks to build a single sign-on system which only requires a one-time authentication for users to gain access to Hana’s affiliates as well as other external platforms, allowing for mutual customer base expansion synergy.

The banking conglomerate also plans to expand partnerships centered on areas closely related to people's lives, such as mobility, real estate and health.

To bolster its data capabilities, Hana is carrying out a data talent development project to increase the group's data headcounts from the current 1,600 to 2,500 by 2025.

To this end, the group is expanding elementary-intermediate data education courses centered on DT University, which was launched by Hana in 2020 to foster digital technology talent. Other than its own school, it also plans to open education courses with leading universities in Korea, including Seoul National University, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and Pohang University of Science and Technology to develop advanced data competency courses.

The group’s efforts for digital transformation has reaped some fruitful results.

The combined number of subscribers of Hana 1Q, the group's leading smart finance app and 1Q Pay, its payment service, stood at 19.7 million people as of the end of last year.

The figure has been showing stable growth from 13.68 million in 2019, 15.45 million in 2020, and 17.01 million in 2021.

By Park Han-na(hnpark@heraldcorp.com)