Korea Credit Information Services (KCIS) carried out a switch to its credit information and insurance credit information inquiry service to a service that now requires membership. However, it will continue to carry out its current non-membership system for the time being due to requests from industries. FinTech companies have started to take appropriate actions considering the change to KCIS’ system.
According to relevant industries, KCIS started operating its credit information and insurance credit information inquiry service on membership basis on the 3rd. Its service, which was used just through fingerprint authentication in the past, now requires membership. As a result, people now have to become members after going through e-mail authentication process and others and perform text authentication process once a year to use KCIS’ services such as ‘Credit For You’ and others.
“This decision was made to enhance protection on individual credit information.” said a representative for KCIS. “By operating our services based on membership, we will be able to partially solve personal credit information leakage issues.”
However, KCIS has decided to leave one-month grace period until it completely changes all of its services to be based on membership to accommodate requests from FinTech and InsurTech industries that opposed KCIS’ decision.
“It is likely that FinTech and InsurTech companies considered about various plans after KCIS announced its decision and gave one-month grace period.” said a representative for the industry. “Relevant industries had had time to change their systems during this one-month grace period.”
In November, KCIS announced that it would change its credit information inquiry service to a membership basis system as it believed that it needed to protect consumers after financial companies and FinTech and InsurTech companies scrapped personal information indiscriminately. In the past, financial companies and FinTech and InsurTech companies scrapped information from KCIS and used it for their applications.
Card issuers, savings banks, FinTech companies, and InsurTech companies decided to take appropriate measures due to a change to KCIS’ credit information inquiry service.
“Since we have one month until KCIS completely changes its credit information inquiry system, we are considering how we are going to provide our relevant services.” said a representative for a large FinTech company. “We are looking into taking appropriate actions that correspond to KCIS’ intention.”
“We are going to consider various processes during this one-month grace period.” said a representative for an InsurTech company. “We currently have idea on how we are going to provide our services and we will be able to completely adapt to the new inquiry system after this grace period is over.”
KCIS is also preparing a mobile version of credit information inquiry service. It is currently having discussions internally and it is planning to make the mobile version public sometime next year. It is preparing a mobile version because it was criticized by FinTech and InsurTech industries that its web-based credit information inquiry service did not meet current mobile trend.
“We are currently preparing a mobile version of credit information inquiry service and we are planning to make it public sometime next year.” said a representative for KCIS. “We are looking into a service that corresponds to current mobile trend.”
Staff Reporter Park, Yoonho | yuno@etnews.com