FSC Korea Announces Plans to Promote Use of Big Data in Finance

Personal and business credit information system called CreDB was established at the Korea Credit Information Services, offering financial data to financial companies, enterprises, and academia beginning on June 3, 2019. Due to a rise in demand, the CreDB system needs to be improved to make more types of datasets available, improve server capacity to make deep learning and other types of more sophisticated data analysis possible, and make cross convergence and analysis possible between the CreDB data and other types of non-financial data. The improved CreDB system will help increase credit data usage by financial and non-financial companies as well as academia. The upgrades made to the CreDB will facilitate the development of more innovative financial and convergence-based services while promoting the advancement of more in-depth research and artificial intelligence development. The key planned improvements to CreDB include:

• Introduction of insurance database from July 01, user-tailored database from second half of 2020, and educational database from July 01
• Boosting of the server capacity in the second half of 2020 to enable deep learning and other artificial intelligence based data analysis methods
• Facilitation of research based on convergence of data between CreDB data and other non-financial data sets by building a database designated for converged data sets in the second half of 2020

Korea Financial Telecommunications and Clearings (KFTC) Institute manages and stores extensive amount of payment information, such as account transfers, electronic payments, and electronic bill transactions. These data can be used to analyze cash flows and how consumers use financial services. As such, the government will support the creation of KFTC’s financial big data system through a three-stage process.

• KFTC will begin to provide big data analysis service for financial companies to help improve their operation (second half of 2020).
• With the revised Credit Information Act taking effect on August 05, the use of anonymized and pseudonymized data will be more widely available. To facilitate the use of financial payment information for research and other purposes, KFTC will create an open big data system for financial payment information, which will be made available through websites and API as well as upon request (first half of 2021).
• Once designated as a data specializing institution, KFTC will provide data convergence service to financial and non-financial companies as well as fintech (first half of 2021).

With the creation of KFTC’s financial big data system, the use of financial big data and data convergence with other industries will become more widespread. Fintechs and startups will be given more opportunities to venture into new business areas while consumer convenience will be improved. The government will continue to work on developing the data infrastructure in the financial sectors and launch a public-private joint council on promoting big data to further advance the big data industry.

Related Links

• Press Release on Promoting Big Data (PDF)
• Press Release on Working Group Meeting  (PDF)

Keywords: Asia Pacific, Korea, Banking, Insurance, Securities, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Fintech, CreDB, Credit Risk, FSC