Spending Care service, a step forward in super customization

You have a vague feeling that you spend a lot on take-out coffees and knowing how much you pay for coffee a month would definitely help trim monthly expenses. But at the same time, you keep forgetting about putting together respective transactions because it comes as a negligible nuisance.

Now your credit card will take care of such an issue. Hyundai Card in April deployed an artificial intelligence-based digital service jointly developed with Personetics, an Israeli fintech company. The so-called “Hyundai Card Spending Care by Personetics” feature added to the Hyundai Card smartphone app analyzes each customer’s credit card transactions and offers near-real time personalized and proactive spending insights. The service goes so far as to provide shopping advice and recommendations.

The new service has been made possible by the combination of Hyundai Card’s data science capabilities with Personetics’ use of data science and real customer financial information to automatically configure and categorize all transactions.

“With various rich external data sources and ability to analyze,” said David Deok-hwan Kim, head of Card Business at Hyundai Card, “we pushed ahead to gain a competitive edge in the market by offering a next-level personal finance management service that provides its customers with more practically helpful insights and highlights Hyundai Card’s winning points.”

The Spending Care shows messages and data analysis results tailor-made for individual customers. The service is able to send around 80 different types of messages centering around spending analysis results and abnormal spending detection.

Hyundai Card Spending Care by Personetics detects unseen spending destination (left) and names a customer “Coffee Lover” when it learns he or she drinks a lot of coffee, showing related expenditure data (right). (Source=screen capture)

Based on each customer’s expenditure on a flurry of items at different outlets ranging from transportation to restaurants, cafes, gyms, cultural events, hospitals and many others, the service learns common patterns and characteristics. Then the app shows messages containing summaries of spending at specific sectors each month – takeout coffees or taxis, for instance – in a friendly and humorous manner. The messages become even more sophisticated when the amount of expenditure grows and spending categories diversify.

“You are a coffee lover. Coffee is no different than a fuel for a daily life,” the message reads for customers frequenting cafés, adding details of respective expenditure on coffee and summary.

When repeated transactions at the same outlet during the same time span are detected, the service asks if there has been any mistake of making a redundant expenditure. The service is also able to notice abrupt changes in the customer’s monthly bills and to issue alerts to customers that the time has come for a haircut, based on the frequency of his or her previous visits. Messages containing benefits at specific shopping outlets such as time deals or discount coupons are sent.

Hyundai Card Spending Care by Personetics is one of a series of fintech technologies Hyundai Card has developed over the past several years through collaboration with other global companies including IBM as it pushed ahead with developing customized financial services by analyzing massive consumer data accumulated. The goal is to deliver optimized consumer service at a customized timeframe via a customized channel, which Hyundai Card has named “super customization.”

Faced with flagging revenue and stagnated growth, credit card firms have scrambled to launch personalized digital services relying on artificial intelligence and big data as a breakthrough. Revision to the personal information protection act in Korea earlier this year is set to prop up personalized services. Before the revision, card issuers knew where their customers swiped cards and how much was spent but were blocked from the information on which products were bought. When the revised act goes into effect in August 2020, the ban will be lifted, meaning card issuers will have a higher chance of predicting which offline outlet a certain customer is likely to visit and which products he or she will purchase. That will lead to enhanced customer satisfaction and increased profits from synergy with franchises and other business partners. 

Hyundai Card has betted on data science and AI from way before. “People used to think that only top digital companies like Google deal with data, but now everyone needs to use data regardless of what business they are in,” said Hyundai Card CEO and Vice Chairman Ted Chung earlier.

The company has since 2015 spent more than 300 billion won ($244 million) on beefing up its data science capabilities. It has also expanded human resources specializing in digital business and transformed organizational structure, corporate culture and infrastructure to that end. Hyundai Card’s partnership with a series of business partners for private label credit cards such as Korean Air Lines, Costco, eBay has contributed to boosting data pool.

For Personetics, Hyundai Card is the first credit card issuer in Asia it has exclusively partnered with. The two companies have been working on the Spending Care service since early 2019.

Having partnered with around 50 renowned banks and credit card issuers worldwide including Wells Fargo, Chase and Royal Bank of Canada to cater to more than 65 million customers, Personetics is a global powerhouse for data-driven personalization and customer engagement solutions. The nine-year-old Tel Aviv-based company provides a rich library of over 250 pre-configured insights that banks and credit card companies can utilize out of the box.
As to the reason for opting to work together exclusively with Hyundai Card among Korean companies, Personetics cited Hyundai Card as “being a dynamic, forward-thinking and leading credit card company both in Korea and globally.”

“We were interested in helping Hyundai Card reach its goal of offering personalized and proactive insights, advice and recommendations to its credit card customers,” said a Personetics spokesperson,  “to help differentiate themselves from their competitors while offering the best service to their customers.”
The kind of customer services jointly developed by Hyundai Card and Personetics are different from the services Personetics developed for banks. Latter are mostly for facilitating customer problem solving process and personal financial management. Detection of anomaly in any transactions to prevent potential financial fraud is a common feature for all of Personetics clients.

Hyundai Card Spending Care by Personetics will continue evolving. In the coming months It is set to roll out additional services and features for budgeting and rewards programs by aggregating more data through partnership with Korea fintech companies.

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