If you visit Korea, especially Seoul, you will see that Fintech is everywhere and has become a standard practice for many industries. Korean fintech startups and companies have made the lives of many Koreans a lot easier. Today Koreans can pay their bills, access their banks, and even shop online more accessible than ever through their smartphones. This article will focus on invest-tech startups looking to streamline aspects of the investment process. It is a subset of fintech, and in Korea, startups in the industry are looking to create the next-generation investment platform. They are incorporating new technologies such as big data and AI to acquire information quickly and create accurate prediction forecasts.
$250 Million Fund for Korean Fintech Startups
The Financial Services Commission will set up a 300 billion won fund for fintech companies. They aim to help South Korea become a global testbed for fintech firms. This will be a massive boost for the Korean fintech industry. In addition, the fund will stimulate Korean banks to give out more loans to Fintech startups, SMEs, and firms. Furthermore, the South Korean government is looking to ease regulations and cut red tape to help accelerate the fintech industry in Korea. These regulatory sandboxes for fintech companies that use new technologies like Blockchain, machine learning, and big data will be exempt from tight regulations. Hopefully, this will lead to innovation in the Fintech space and create promising Fintech startups in the future.
Top Invest-Tech Korean Fintech Startups
Qraft Technologies
Korean fintech startup Qraft Technologies is the creator of two AI-powered exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on the New York Stock Exchange. The two AI-enhanced ETFs are Qraft AI-Enhanced US Large-Cap ETF and Qraft AI-Enhanced US Large Cap Momentum ETF. Both are powered by AI technology which picks stocks based on its forecast of share price movements and market data. Furthermore, both returned favorable returns in 2021.
The startup specializes in developing and operating deep learning-based algorithms that provide portfolio analysis to financial institutions using AI technology. So far, they have listed 6 ETFs on the New York Stock Exchange.
Qraft Technologies got a $146 million investment from SoftBank Group. The investment will be used to expand into China and the United States. They will work together to work on developing AI-enabled public portfolio management systems for SoftBank.
“We built up credibility as an AI trading platform by cooperating with brokerage firms from early on. It laid the groundwork for us to offer our own products to retail investors,” said Kim Hyung-sik, CEO of Qraft Technologies.
Fount
Korean Fintech startup Fount is a company that helps investors plan and stably manage their assets. It is a Robo-advisor engine that gathers the best mix of assets to invest in. Their Robo-advisor is called Bluewhale. It can filter data, see asset clusters, select investments, and weight allocations, and make a personalized portfolio for the investor. In addition, they have an AI-powered personal pension service that allows investors to build and manage their pension portfolios. Therefore investors can set up and fund an account whenever they want and be provided with investment advice. The app was co-developed by Fount and Maeil Business Newspaper. The fee for using the service is just .5%. However, other financial institutions usually charge around 1.5%.
Fount has raised over $58.5 million in investments from Hana Financial Investment, Nice Investment, Shinhan Capital, KDB, LB Investment, SmileGate Investment, Korea Growth Investment Corp., STIC ventures, Korea Development Bank, and The Wells Investment.
“The 1% fee could make a big difference in investment returns in the end especially for pensions because they are long-term investments,” said the CEO of Fount, Kim Young-bin.
Rainist
Korean Fintech startup Rainist is the operator of Banksalad, a financial product recommendation service. Banksalad has attracted over 5 million customers to date. They want to become the next-generation asset management platform that manages peer-to-peer investments and cryptocurrencies. Rainist is an all-in-one money management service that recommends users’ financial products and credit cards based on the user’s financial status and spending habits. Their service links to the user’s bank accounts and credit cards to track their expenses, income, savings, and bills to help them form the best monthly budget plan.
The Bank Salad App
The app offers an open banking platform for users by pooling the user’s financial information. Therefore users can now monitor their bank balance and transactions as well as their credit card bills and loan payments on the app. In addition, Bank Salad also recommends financial products such as credit cards, savings plans, loans, insurance products, and pension plans based on the user’s financial data and spending patterns. Currently, the app handles over $12 billion a month.
“We will develop the Bank Salad app as a comprehensive platform to recommend an ideal financial solution for each customer,” said Rainist CEO Kim Tae-Hoon.
Rainist raised $38 million in funding after their series C funding round. This brings their total budget to $52.5 million. Therefore, the startup is now valued at $250 million. Some of their investors include Base Investment, Kiwoom Investment, KB Investment, Company K Partners, Intervest, IMM Investment, and Stonebridge Ventures, just to name a few. Their focus in 2022 will be to give financial information to the people for them to make the right decisions. Moreover, since big data is becoming a solid commodity, Rainist looks to continue introducing innovative and creative services by gathering various data.
Finda
Korean Fintech Startup Finda is a paperless loan platform powered by big data. Therefore, the loan platform allows users to get the maximum loan amount and lowest interest possible through their mobile app. In addition, the app allows the user to take out loans according to those conditions. They were able to raise $10 million in funding to date from Korean VC firms Intervest, Mega Investment, 500 Startups, Translink Capital, and KIA. Their focus for 2022 will be to enhance their service and keep providing information on their web portal regarding financial products. They have already teamed up with over 50 institutions in Korea.
“We will continue to enhance our service to have none of financial customers lose out of financial information they can fully take advantage of,” said CEO of Finda, Lee Hye-Min
AIZEN
Korean Fintech Startup AIZEN provides business-focused AI applications for finance. They are the creators of an AI engine called ABACUS which can automate big data analysis for key decision-making. AIZEN uses machine learning, deep learning, and predictive models to provide the best financial solution. Furthermore, through the ABACUS platform, businesses can automate retail banking and insurance and predict economic patterns. Therefore, AIZEN is partnering with many banks and other financial institutions so they can use their platform to decrease risk and increase efficiency.
AIZEN Thas a joint research team at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). They are responsible for researching AI with IBM Watson. They are already working with Woori Bank to implement their AI system. In addition, they are working with the Korean government to create better finance systems using AI technology. They have raised $4.2 million for their series B round led by SEMA Translink Investment and Korea Growth Investment. Therefore, their total capital raised to date stands at $9 million.
“We have developed an automatic credit cycle control model using AI. Based on that we are building autonomous banking,” said the CEO of AIZEN, Jung Seok Kang.
QARA
Korean Fintech startup QARA uses AI and deep-learning technology (KOSHO) to analyze and predict the financial market. It is a Robo advisor that offers market predictions for the upcoming week. They base their prediction on over 400 million financial market indicators from the previous 30 years. QARA’s deep learning engine, Market Dreamer, analyzes the stock markets in countries such as Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and the US. Moreover, they are also using Market Dreamer to predict the crypto market.
KOSHO has over 150,000 downloads to date and is available in 5 languages. In addition, their analytics tool Whatisfund.ia will allow users to compare stocks and financial news through related keywords. Therefore, the technology behind the search engine tool for Whatisfund.ai uses Word2Vec and FastText, both strong AI deep learning algorithms.
“Through Whatisfund.ai, we hope to dramatically increase efficiency and ultimately help financial companies build autonomy and convenience in allocating global assets, thereby building their overall competitiveness in the market,” said CEO of QARA Luke Byun.
QARA raised $3 million from Nexon’s NXC, Mirae Asset x Naver, and Kingsley Asset Management for their series A round.
DeepSearch
Korean Fintech startup DeepSearch is developing a platform with a search engine and a computational engine powered by financial big data. Big data in Korea for the financial sector has enormous potential. The DeepSearch platform enables investors to delve into desired datasets and topics they want to analyze. Therefore, they can build an investment hypothesis and test it without the complex calculations required by traditional approaches. All you have to do is enter a topic or a keyword phrase, and their platform will handle the rest. In addition, they provide B2B financial information services to businesses and industries. For example, they partnered with Samsung last year to integrate their services into Bixby, Samsung’s personal assistant.
“Our job is to impose a structure on raw financial data so that investors would find significance in the database,” said Kim Jae-Yun, CEO at DeepSearch.
AIM
Korean Fintech startup AIM is an automated investment management platform. They combine advanced know-how in mobile technology with big data and computer algorithms. Moreover, their system works with existing investment institutions to allow users in Korea to make trades and investments via their smartphones. In addition, AIM claims they can reduce the cost of trading to 1/40th. This is possible because AIM outsources trading to brokers covering licensing and compliance fees. Their service is called Esther. It made an average of 10%-15% in yearly return on investment.
Users will be asked a few questions so that Esther can get a behavioral bias for their automated investment plan. Therefore, the questions include the user’s age, annual income, investment experience, employment status, investment period, the volume of assets, and risk intelligence. Their 2022 plan targets Taiwan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Singapore.
Doomoolmori
Doomoolmori is an AI Fintech startup in Korea that offers a hyper-personalized investment service called Path Finder. It manages optimized individual portfolios based on the goals of each account. Doomoolmori uses AI technology for real-time goal optimization to continuously suggest the best investment strategy. It does this by monitoring financial markets in real-time for optimal asset allocation suggestions to achieve the target rate of return. Each goal is personalized to the investor’s level of purpose and risk. Early tests have performed return rates of over 20%.
Doommoolmori registered two patents and has been selected for several government R&D projects, including the Startup Growth Technology Development Project, which is a part of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups.
Tessa
TESSA is an alternative investment platform that allows for the purchase, sale, and trade of fractionalized ownership interests in investment-grade “blue-chip” artworks with the accessibility and liquidity of public markets. The platform is called TESSA MUSEUM and is available for both IoS and Android.
The mobile-app-based platform enables white-listed “micro-collectors” to co-own fractional ownership interests in data curated blue-chip artwork represented as “digital ownership certificates” stored on a public blockchain.
AKROS
AKROS is an AI-driven asset management platform that developed its own data infrastructure and trains AI models at a level comparable to global quantitative hedge funds. They plan to continuously update their proprietary AI models to maximize the performance of data-driven ETFs. By 2023, they plan to enter the consumer and hedge fund industry. They have acquired relevant investment advisory licenses for their B2C investment platform service.
