President Lee Tae-hoon of NH Bank.

NH Bank provided a free consultation to Mr. A on how to turn his private business into a corporation to avoid high taxes levied on the earnings of private businesses.

Thanks to the consultation, he successfully completed the legal work to turn his private business into a corporation to pay less tax within three months of getting the consultation.

He said he got the best advice possible from the NH Bank’s Business Management Consultation Team, and he was able to secure a new base for his business operation, thanks to the free advice provided by NH Bank.

As in the case of Mr. A, the bank’s business management consulting service has emerged as a fixer for business problems with the number of consultations totaling over 300 cases from 2010 when the service was launched and until the end of 2017.

This year, consultation cases have amounted to around 41 through the end of July, and the total this year is likely to overtake last year’s 52.

The consulting service unit has a number of experts in such area, such as tax and accounting so they can give tailor-made advice to clients of the bank if they ask for the consultations.

The bank set up the new service to provide support to clients for their operational growth. Any businesses with more than 1 billion won in annual turnover can ask for the consultations at any of its branches across the country. The service unit, when launched, had only two consultants, but the number has grown to five.

One or two consultants visit the office of the client for a week or two until the job is done, with no charges for the service. The bank values the consulting services provided for a week by a professional consultant based on SME-size firm’s operational expenses to be around 8.34 million won.

The bank also gives consultations to firms with average financial situations or those about to launch their business.

Its farm foods consulting service unit can be used by firms engaged in such areas production, distribution, sales and exports in the farm foods business sector.

What makes the bank’s consultation service special has been the efforts put in by its senior officials, led by President Lee Dae-hoon, who often tour farm regions in the country to get first-hand information on the situations including the most recent developments in the farms and related businesses for their direct input in the cooperative and support plans.

Vice President Yoo Yun-dae in charge of the Corporate Investment Finance, toured the SMEs operating around the country starting from the aluminum and steel equipment fabrication plants in the Capital Area to hear the problems they have in connection with the bank’s support to take care of the problems for them.

NH Bank, one of the largest commercial lenders in South Korea with more than US$250 billion in assets, trusts SAS to help transform its business and better understand its customers through machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

With more than 20 million customers, NH Bank understands the importance of fostering a connection and providing a personalized customer experience as the institution continues to grow. To meet their personalization goals and speed digital transformation efforts, NH Bank looked to advanced analytics.

Through SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning on SAS Viya, the organization created a customer big data portal which provided a complete view of each customer.

The portal supports both structured and unstructured data allowing the bank to run a variety of visual reports which provide analytical insights into individuals and enterprise customers.

NH Bank officials led by Vice President Yoo Yun-dae, 2nd L, in charge of Corporate Investment held a business consultation during their recent visit to Single Rider Co. in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province. (Photos: NH Bank)