President Lee Kwang-goo of Woori Bank.

Woori Bank, which has been growing at a surprising pace, sees “WiBee Talk,” a mobile messenger for the bank, becoming one of its future growth engines.

President Lee Kwang-goo told a group of reporters that the bank plans to nurture WiBee Talk as a platform that can connect with various other business sectors, securing a great number of customers for the mobile platform.

The bank launched the mobile messenger for the first time in the banking industry on Jan. 6 has been attracting a large number of customers due to its intuitive interface and an ad campaign employing Gagman Yoo Jae-suk as a model.

The mobile messenger had already secured 100,000 subscribers by Jan. 31, and the number surpassed 900,000 as of March 17. It’s expected to surpass 1 million by the end of March. The number of customers is two-times faster than that set by the Car Talk, which is called “the messenger for the people.” The latter’s subscriber base came to 1 million within six months of its launch.

The messages are stored on servers in Japan and are erased within five days to protect security. That feature has been well received by the public.

The WiBee Talk can connect with the WiBee Bank, Woori Bank’s mobile professional bank, to provide diverse financial services for its subscribers including loans with interest rates as low as 0.2 percent per annum.

The bank has been considering to develop various financial products for WiBee subscribers, who have been expanding fast. The first product to come out of the plan is the WiBee Market Place in July, which is an open market-type platform. The SMEs that deal with Woori Bank are welcome to use the platform for their public relations campaigns and can use the platform to connect buyers for their products.

President Lee said the fees will be cut to a minimum, much lower than those charged at the open markets, to show the bank’s intention that it always has SME customers’ best interest in mind. In the process, the bank will come up with financial services suitable to those customers so it can attract new consumers to the bank, the CEO said.

The bank also plans to set up a “consultation corner” for wealth management at the WiBee Talk providing information such as a restaurant guide. The idea is to make the instrument broadly handy in the daily lives of customers. Woori Bank also plans to use WiBee Talk to further expand its global operation. The bank already introduced WiBee Talk versions in English and Chinese, but also added other foreign language versions including Vietnamese and Indonesian. 

The bank took over a local bank in Indonesia, and is on its way to set up a Vietnamese subsidiary, as well as WiBee Talk versions in other languages. They will provide financial services to local residents in those countries, which will be key to the growth of the operations there.

Officials of the bank said they are considering developing a variety of new business areas in those places in addition to providing financial services through WiBee Talk.

Woori Bank, however, would like to see the number of customers using WiBee Talk to surpass 3 million. “Depending on the penetration rate of smartphones, we will consider launching the WiBee Bank service in Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries in the first half of next year,” a bank official said.

As of Nov. 11, loans extended through the WiBee Bank services exceeded 40 billion won in Korea, with demand for insurance and savings products on mobile devices growing, the bank said in a statement.

If a local customer applies for a loan from WiBee Bank on his smartphone in Korea, the bank transmits the requested money to his bank account. But in an emerging market where the number of banks is low, a Woori Bank employee pays a visit to the customer in person to handle his request, the bank said.

A model displays an ad for WiBee Talk, which is known as the first talk base financial commodity.(Photos:Woori Bank)