U-Bank Consortium’ led by Lendit, Lunit, JOBIS & Villains and Other Start-ups to Create 4th Generation Internet Bank

Lendit(렌딧), Lunit(루닛), JOBIS &Villanins (자비스앤빌런즈), TravelWallet(트래블월렛) and Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance(현대해상) have formed the “U-Bank” consortium to apply for preliminary approval as the fourth internet bank. This new consortium will be the fourth specialised internet bank, following the KCD Bank and SOSO Bank consortia.

The consortium includes fintechs such as Lendit, JOBIS &Villanins and TravelWallet, as well as startups with innovative technologies such as Lunit. The reason tech startups are joining the Internet Banking Consortium is that there is a consensus that it is possible to develop financial services that include the unbanked and underbanked, who have been unable to access the traditional financial sector. Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance, a property and casualty insurer, will participate to ensure the business and financial stability of the Internet bank.

The U-Bank consortium’s inclusive finance agenda includes inclusive finance for seniors, inclusive finance for micro and small businesses, and inclusive finance for foreigners. It aims to solve the problems of our rapidly changing society from a financial perspective.

The U-Bank consortium plans to provide personalised financial services to the financially excluded, including senior citizens, micro, small and medium enterprises and foreigners, through granular analysis.

It also has the capacity to develop a credit rating model to increase the supply of medium-interest loans to internet banks. Lendit, which is responsible for the credit model technology division of the U-Bank consortium, has focused on developing technology for medium-interest personal loans since its establishment in 2015. It has developed its own credit scoring model, the Lendit Scoring System (LSS), based on big data analysis and machine learning, as well as a 100% non-face-to-face lending platform. It has been handling medium-interest loans for the past nine years, and has accumulated data on 15 million loan applications and 2.7 million approvals. In addition, it will be able to leverage big data on healthcare, small businesses and n-jobbers, foreign finance, and various insurance-related data from participating companies such as Lunit, JOBIS &Villanins, TravelWallet, and Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance.

Sungjoon Kim, CEO of Lendit, said, “While the first generation of internet banks such as K-bank, Kakao Bank, and Toss Bank opened the door to banking innovation with user convenience and new financial products such as non-face-to-face transactions, the second generation of internet banks will lead the era of hyper-personalisation of finance based on AI technology and big data.” “The U-Bank consortium is a collaboration of ICT start-ups and traditional financial companies, who have agreed to combine their strengths to create a new bank for the future. It will represent a new model of win-win collaboration between start-ups and traditional conglomerates.”