"Have You Heard of AI Household Ledger? The Era of One Person, One Financial Assistant is Coming" [Financial Insider]

Google alumnus developer Kim Moon-kyu, BankSalad CTO
10 years of experience in Silicon Valley, USA
Plans to launch 'AI Household Ledger & Financial Assistant' in Q4
AI also takes center stage in asset management 'Topping+'

The financial sector is experiencing a wave of artificial intelligence (AI). It is now standard for AI chatbots to handle financial consultation services, and on top of that, the fintech (finance + technology) industry is rolling out financial assistants for the era of one AI per person. BankSalad, a fintech company that started with MyData, is also enhancing its existing popular services using AI and plans to launch new AI-centered services in the fourth quarter of this year.

Kim Moon-gyu, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of BankSalad, who oversees AIX (AI Transformation) at BankSalad, met with Asia Economy on the 8th in Mapo-gu, Seoul, and said, “The biggest reason AI is important in the financial sector is hyper-personalization. Even now, financial services are provided based on demographic criteria, but even if age groups, consumption tendencies, or even workplaces are similar, financial situations often differ. Truly customized services still have limitations,” he explained.

To provide ‘hyper-personalized’ services, BankSalad’s core service, the ‘Household Ledger,’ recently integrated AI. Users who choose the app-based household ledger instead of a handwritten one would want their personal spending details to be automatically categorized and their consumption tendencies neatly analyzed. To properly classify and analyze users’ spending details, the ‘Household Ledger’ service must continue to be enhanced, and in this process, the QA (Quality Assurance) team creates virtual spending data to test whether the ‘Household Ledger’ operates correctly. AI is used to generate this virtual spending data.

Explaining the integration of the household ledger and AI, CTO Kim said, “Manually created test payment records covered less than 10% of all consumption types. If the spending data generated by AI is plausible, it can verify from 50% up to 100%.”

Kim Moon-kyu, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of BankSalad, is being interviewed by Asia Economy on the 8th in Mapo-gu, Seoul. [Image source=BankSalad]

AI is expected to play a leading role in the asset management service ‘Topping+,’ which is targeted for release within this year. Topping+ shows financial information that users might be interested in through a conversational format based on MyData. If users want detailed advice, they can continue the conversation by asking additional questions. CTO Kim said, “For users interested in overseas stocks like Tesla and Nvidia, we can provide investment information by summarizing dozens of domestic and international analysis reports. We are also experimenting with a so-called ‘pros and cons debate’ feature that consecutively shows arguments for and against a particular stock’s price movement.”

He added, “It was impressive that many questions during the prototype testing process were related to travel and consumption. From the user’s perspective, finance no longer stops at banks and cards. Topping+ has decided to expand the scope of finance to areas closely related to daily life.” Accordingly, users planning a vacation can create travel itineraries on Topping+ that consider not only their usual expenses and income but also travel patterns and food preferences. Since Topping+ understands the user’s average spending and income details, it might even advise, ‘It would be better not to take a vacation this time.’

CTO Kim’s position is that to increase user benefits through BankSalad’s AI services, the ‘resolution’ of MyData must be improved. Detailed data is necessary to solve users’ financial concerns. “The problems users want to know about and are curious about are very detailed. For example, consider a situation where grocery spending has sharply increased. With current data, we can only show that money was spent at ‘OO Mart.’ But if the data resolution improves? We can tell what was purchased and which brands had the highest spending.”

CTO Kim is a software expert who graduated from the Department of Computer Science at KAIST and worked for two years at Amazon and seven years at Google, major US big tech companies, starting in 2012. After about ten years in Silicon Valley, he joined BankSalad in 2021.