Kakao Pay's Pavlovian account will mine your data for you

Finance

Published: 22 Sep. 2020, 18:43 Updated: 22 Sep. 2020, 19:11

Kakao Pay's Pavlovian account will mine your data for you

Kakao Pay senior manager of asset management Kim Sung-hoon, left and Kakao Pay CPO Lee Seung-hyo give a presentation to the press at an online seminar on Thursday. [KAKAO PAY]

Kakao Pay is set to mine your personal data and incentivize you with conditioning to live better with its newly introduced securities account.

The account is called the Bucket List and will eventually utilize the government's new MyData initiative.

“In the era of MyData, the fundamental goal for our asset management service is to combine various customer data, analyze them and connect customers with services and products specific to their needs,” said Lee Seung-hyo, chief product officer of Kakao Pay, at an online seminar with the press Thursday.

“We want to facilitate an ecosystem where various products and services are made available together for the customers.”

MyData allows companies to trawl through information about their customers helped by financial institutions in order to develop products for them.

Kakao Pay's first step in building its own financial ecosystem is the Bucket List service, introduced on the day of the event, which helps customers regularly save money and achieve financial goals.

The service comes after Kakao Pay customer data showed that even though users were interested in managing their assets, many had trouble forming healthy spending habits.

Kakao says the Bucket List service can help customers set monthly savings goals, the desired savings amount and necessary payments. It sends motivational messages, uses a progress bar to help track the amount of money collected and allows customers to share their accomplishments with others.

The asset management service Bucket List made available by Kakao Pay. [KAKAO PAY]

It also includes a function to help customers change spending habits. The service tracks the user’s consumption patterns, and whenever a certain expense the user would like to change occurs, a set amount is automatically deposited in the individual's Bucket List account. For instance, 10,000 won ($8.60) is deposited to the Bucket List account when the person purchases a box of cigarettes.

The company says credit information will be secured by systems guaranteed by the Financial Security Institute and the Korea Internet & Security Agency.

A maximum of five goals can be set up per user. Accounts will be managed by Kakao Pay Securities, the brokerage arm of Kakao Pay. Customers can freely withdraw money or close their accounts. Interest is 0.6 percent a year paid weekly.

While the service is currently built on scraped data or extracted information from websites and the Kakao Pay platform without customer consent, the fintech company expects the service will become more accurate once it starts to merge information from other Kakao platforms, namely the Kakao Talk messenger app.

“Forming habits and attaining small goals is the first step in asset management. We hope our service can create a virtuous cycle where customers have fun forming financial habits which leads to them achieving bigger financial goals,” said Kim Sung-hoon, senior manager at Kakao Pay.

BY KANG JAE-EUN [kang.jaeeun@joongang.co.kr]