Nonghyup, which has maintained its position as an agricultural financial organization for the past 57 years, has emerged as the biggest South Korean IT bank that distributes financial ITs.
It has emerged as the biggest API (Application Programming Interface) distributor in South Korea while still focusing on its traditional financial method that has controlled loans on machineries such as cultivator and others and traffic of meat processing.
It has opened up a BaaP (Banking as a Platform) ear with APIs that are integrated financial IT. BaaP indicates a cooperative model where bank ITs become third-party platforms.
According to financial industry, performance of Nonghyup Bank’s API dominated amount of API trades and total number of API trades from all South Korean banks.
According to an internal report of Nonghyup Bank’s open platforms obtained by The Electronic Times, amount of API trades in 2018 (until the end of May) was $673 million (744.7 billion KRW) and it is increased by 733% compared to the same duration from last year. Number of trades was 1.21 million cases and it is increased by 170% compared to the same duration from last year. Amount and number of trades from Nonghyup Bank is bigger than that of all South Korean banks put together.
Amount of trades based on a month has reached $181 million (200 billion KRW). In May, amount of API trades and number of API trades from Nonghyup Bank were $180 million (199.8 billion KRW, 733.1% increase from last year) and 288,942 cases (170.4% increase from last year) respectively. However, Nonghyup Bank did not disclose its performance from API commissions. It is heard that Nonghyup Bank has made more than 300% of profit compared to last year.
Number of companies that use Nonghyup’s APIs has reached 49. SK Planet and Paygate are the ones from fields of finance and wire transfer that are using Nonghyup’s APIs. From P2P finance field, 8 Percent and Beyond Fund are using Nonghyup’s APIs.

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Korea Information & Communication Co. and Infobank are the ones from fields of money management and personal authentication that are using Nonghyup’s APIs while Gyeonggi-do and Incheon National University are some of public institutions that are using its APIs. Currently, up to 130 Nonghyup Bank’s APIs are made public externally.
API emerged as an alternative to have EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and (Payment Services Directive (PSD))2 to go into effect. The point of PSD2 is for banks to provide financial data to third parties when customers agree to it. As a result, financial companies are now faced with having to make financial information public through APIs. This is the reason why financial industries are competing fiercely to grab upper hands of API markets.
Because number and amount of APIs from Nonghyup Bank is dominating that of other banks, there are discussions about deriving Nonghyup’s model as a standard for API security process. Intent of these discussions is to package APIs that are individually supplied by different banks. While separate security process needs to be prepared to package APIs, Nonghyup is the only one that has established security guidelines.
Based on success, Nonghyup is pushing for a new digital strategy called ‘ACIO (All Connected In&Out)’, which will create new values by connecting different things. First of all, Nonghyup is planning to look for APIs that fir different industries. Its plan is to drastically expand application of its APIs. It is also planning to establish an omnidirectional API alliance system with a large IT platform provider. Its goal is to create South Korea’s first embedded banking.
“As large IT corporations such as Amazon, Facebook, and Alibaba are entering financial industries, upper hands of API markets will be the key for challengers to these IT corporations.” said a representative for Nonghyup Bank. “We are going to introduce various and powerful services by establishing cooperative systems with promising startups.”
Staff Reporter Gil, Jaeshik | osolgil@etnews.com & Staff Reporter Ham, Jihyun | goham@etnews.com