‘Open innovation’ of South Korea’s financial industry was also talked about at ‘Money 20/20 Asia’.
CEO Tracey Davies of Money 20/20 met with reporters on the 20th and pointed out ‘Kakao’ and ‘open banking’ as successful examples of South Korea’s FinTech industry and rated them highly.
“Due to excellent open banking platforms, non-financial companies in South Korea are also able to introduce innovative financial services.” said CEO Davies. “As a result, Kakao that started as a social platform company was able to enter financial industry through Kakao Bank and Kakao Pay.” She also added that an open banking platform lowers authority of current financial industries and allows them to be connected to other types of businesses.
She stated that ‘Platform Ecology’, which is one of the topics of Money 20/20 Asia, is an unique phenomenon that only occurs in Asia.
“South Korea’s Kakao and China’s Alibaba and Tencent have shown connection between finance and retail.” said Davies. “As a result, platform ecology has been vitalized in Asia unlike other continents.”
South Korean companies that visited Money 20/20 Asia also set up their own booths with a topic ‘open banking’. JB Financial Group introduced a newly branded open banking platform ‘obank’. It has opened its APIs (Application Programming Interface) within various fields such as P2P (Peer to Peer) finance, foreign remittance, and mobile POS (Point of Sales). Kwangju Bank and Jeonbuk Bank have opened their APIs to startups within 8 different fields and 3 different fields respectively.
“We established our open banking platform at Phnom Penh Commercial Bank and we are planning to establish our platform at Bank CIMB Niaga by end of this year.” said a representative for JB Financial Group.
“Open banking becoming a hot topic within financial and FinTech industries due to implementation of PSD2 (Payment Services Directive 2) is what is happening in South Korea and Germany.” said an executive of a German startup that visited JB Financial Group’s booth. “Personally, I am highly interested in Kakao Bank and K Bank.”
PSD2 is a payment service guideline regulated by EBA (European Banking Authority) and it has been enforced on members of EU since January of 2018. It allows non-financial industries to participate in payment industry and it enhances competitive edge in FinTech industry.
Hanwha Group presented history and results of its FinTech promotion project called ‘Dreamplus’. Dreamplus that supports ‘open innovation’ was started in 2014 and it supports overseas expansion, investment promotion, and business collaboration of startups that are within Dreamplus. A blockchain payment startup called ‘Terra’, which was co-founded by Chairman Shin Hyun-sung of TMON, has also moved into Dreamplus.
Staff Reporter Ham, Jihyun | goham@etnews.com