President Kwon Kwang-seok of Woori Bank. (Photo: Woori Bank)

In 2020, Woori Bank stepped up efforts to earn more trust from customers through “Zero-Base Innovation” despite many difficulties.

The company fulfilled its social responsibility as a reliable financial institution by practicing co-prosperity and sharing through various social contribution activities, as well as offering financial support for those hit hard by the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The bank picked up the Global Best Bank Prize from The Banker, a world-class financial magazine, proving Woori Bank’s painstaking efforts and sincerity.

“A lot of uncertainties and tough tasks are facing Woori Bank at the beginning of the New Year of 2021,” said Kwon Kwang-seok, president of Woori Bank in his New Year’s message.

“In particular, the emergence of Internet banks, big tech and platform companies armed with strong customer bases and technology is forcing us to implement fundamental innovation to the extent that we have to change the concept of the banking industry. Banks now need to break away from traditional business practices and sharpen digital-based financial competitiveness and develop and use competitive new business models.”

Kwon said he will digitize the bank’s core competitive edges from customers’ perspectives. Kwon stressed the need to make efforts to redefine and upgrade the roles of Woori Bank’s face-to-face channels in line with digital innovation.

His strategy is to make the most of face-to-face channels since they are the differentiated competitiveness of offline banks.

“We have set ‘Digital First, Digital Initiative’ as Woori Bank’s business motto for 2021 and will actively respond to the digital financial market of the future through enterprise-wide digital transformation,” Kwon said in his New Year’s address on Jan. 4.

Kwon chose digital innovation and channel innovation as management keywords for 2021.

“My first management keyword is ‘digital innovation’,” Kwon said. “According to a McKinsey study, 70 percent of companies that attempted digital transformation failed because they only focused on introducing technology. Digital transformation is simply neither a technical concept, nor a task of a specific digital group at the bank headquarters. It means digitizing the core competitive edge of all business practices at the bank, not just products, services and processes.”

This year, Woori Bank will spare no efforts in making “Woori WON Banking” a leading app in the financial sector. On the other hand, the lender will speed up the digitalization of its branches.

“Digital innovation can create differentiated competitiveness and new customer value only when we implement it with customers at the center and from customers’ perspectives,” Kwon said.

“We will also establish customer-centered channels so that our customers can experience optimized finance in both face-to-face and non-face-to-face channels, and make every effort to prepare the My Data or My Finance Projects scheduled to come into effect in 2021,” Kwon added.

In line with digital innovation, Woori Bank should change strategies for its channels, Kwon stressed. “A change is being made in the perception that a branch is a bank,” Kwon continued.

“The number of customers visiting branches is on the decline, and increasingly more and more customers are using banking services digitally in a non-face-to-face way.”

“Nevertheless, face-to-face channels still offer important customer contacts to us and are the only differentiated competitiveness of banks that Internet banks or big technological companies do not have,” Kwon added.

“Therefore, efforts should be made to redefine and upgrade the roles of face-to-face channels, which are our strength in rapidly changing financial environments.”

Kwon mentioned the Value Group System is “not the end point of Woori Bank’s channel strategies, but the starting point of a new change.”

The system is a cooperative mechanism that combines a big branch with four to eight nearby small branches into one group.

Kwon emphasized the expansion of Woori Bank’s customer and profit bases and practical sales, and fair play-based sales.

“Frothy sales and perfidious employees do not to contribute to the growth of our organization and the bank building a better future,” Kwon said.

“Only practical and fair play-based sales can bring a lot of meaningful and positive results to customers and our bank.”