Doing something great
Doing something great
NAVER FINANCIAL I Service & Business I Kim Jae-hong
“What we are doing now in NAVER Financial is something unimaginable in the traditional financial sector. Rather than focusing on profit, we put much more emphasis on whether we are doing something meaningful.” In the financial industry, where profitability is of the utmost importance, focusing on the meaningfulness of work may come across as something unfamiliar. Kim Jae-hong of NAVER Financial, who has 12 years of experience under his belt, is witnessing such difference first-hand. He has worked in 2 financial institutions for a total of 10 years, taking on tasks such as managing credit loans, analyzing profit and loss and planning zero-contact home loan products. He joined NAVER Financial 2 years ago and planned the “loan products for SMEs.” He hopes to address issues in our society through finance, and says this is the reason why he decided to join NAVER Financial.
Tell us about the work you are doing in the financial solution team.
My first project after joining NAVER Financial was planning a loan product for SMEs. I’m also in charge of making improvements to the product after its launch. Our Smart Store business loan is a product for individuals who run their own business online. In most cases, these users are young, don’t run an offline store and have a relatively short history of financial transactions. This means they are often denied loans by banks or financial institutions, and their interest rate would be very high even when they do succeed in getting a loan. But there are so many of them who are doing so well with NAVER Smart Store. So we met with Mira Asset Capital to begin discussions about entrusting NAVER Financial with the credit evaluation process and taking that into consideration when giving them a loan. To be honest there were so many difficulties in initiating such discussions. It was something that no one has ever tried in the financial sector, and people in this industry are usually rather hesitant to try something new, something that has not been validated before.
How did you convince the financial institutions?
NAVER has non-financial data that financial institutions do not use. Some of this data would include the number of times a product was sold, growth rate, return or exchange rate, the number of transactions, and the number of reviews, all of which are available on NAVER Smart Store. We thought such information could be used to determine the credit rating of a business owner. People who are in their early stages of running a business do not have income documents that can back them up, which probably worked against them in getting a loan from traditional financial institutions. We were able to use their credit card history to determine their estimated income, and we continued discussions with Mirae Asset Capital to convince them to use this information for their credit evaluation process.
What is your biggest achievement?
You can say that our credit loan for online business owners is the first of its kind. It’s something that everyone was too afraid to try out. I am especially proud of the approval rate. The percentage of loan applications that are approved is extremely high for our product. For commercial banks, the rate does not go above 20%, and even when you look at non-monetary financial institutions, the approval rate is far from reaching 30%. However, the approval rate for our product is almost 50%. This means 1 out of 2 people trying to take out a loan gets approved. It’s been almost a year since we launched our product, and there have been almost no cases of late payment. I think this is a remarkable accomplishment compared to traditional financial products.
Do you ever get work slumps? If so, how do you pull yourself out of them?
I was extremely busy for about a year since I first joined NAVER Financial. But once things started slowing down, I began to feel a sense of emptiness. For both planning and developing, beginning a new project is always very fun. But its charm slowly wears off once the service is launched and we begin operating the service. You get caught up in those small administrative tasks and users begin losing interest in your service. People might feel that they just want to plan new projects all the time, and I was no exception. At that time, my boss told me that no one can just work all year long, and that I should take a break, and take the time to read newspapers and books. My boss told me that this was the time to save up my passion and energy for when I have to work on product planning for a new project in the future. I really appreciated that advice. I think it would have been a little hard for me to overcome that period if I had been on my own, with no one to give me such advice. I think it’s something that all service planners think about. The company cannot only push for new projects and businesses all year long. So what I do is that I try to keep up with the market trends and think in advance about what kind of projects and services I would be able to plan. I write and report many proposals on my own as well. Not all proposals get turned into actual projects - only about 10% even stand a chance of becoming actual projects. But it opens up chances for me to plan more projects and services.
There must be a lot of challenging moments. What makes you keep going in spite of those moments?
The work at NAVER Financial is not just about profitability. The work I do is also meaningful, which I think is the motivation behind my work. I think it’s also important that I continue to communicate the meaning of our work to my colleagues. I directly work with business owners, and they often thank me or give me great comments like how convenient our service is to use. Getting these positive feedbacks always motivates me to work harder and to create better services for our users. Many other colleagues are helping out with the operation, and I think it should also be made clear to them that they are working on something very meaningful. I think it’s important that these great values and implications of our work are well communicated with my colleagues so that we can all move forward.
