Hyundai to focus on customization

Hyundai Card CEO Chung Tae-yong, left, talks with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty at IBM’s Think event in San Francisco Tuesday. [IBM]

The chief of Hyundai Motor’s financial affiliates outlined the units’ digital strategy and future vision at IBM’s largest annual conference that ran through Friday in San Francisco.

Chung Tae-yong, who heads Hyundai Card, Hyundai Capital and Hyundai Commercial, said that finely-tuning customization will take center stage in Hyundai’s approach to serving financial services’ clients.

“The existing concept of market customization is irrelevant to the current business environment,” said the CEO, whose English name is Ted Chung, during a session with Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM.

“Customization should not be based on widely-held assumptions, like young people might love zombie movies or older people won’t listen to hip-hop music,” Chung said, “If one likes candy, that is just it.”

He went on to note that Hyundai Card holds a wide range of information that points to clients’ daily lives, preferences and hobbies and that the new services under development will be tailored using that data.

Chung also cited Buddy, an AI-based chatbot for customer service using machine learning technology from IBM’s Watson.

“It’s almost impossible to fully understand or memorize the benefits, limits, or conditions of a finance product,” he said.

“So we introduced IBM Watson and it became a very powerful tool to help our employees and helped us to lower our employee turnover rate to less than 10 percent.”

BY PARK EUN-JEE [park.eunjee@joongang.co.kr]