Kwon Kwang-seok, president of Woori Bank, vowed to make Woori Bank reborn as a world-class financial platform company based on digital innovation in the 2022 new year.
“Now we must boldly knock down our framework as a traditional bank and work smarter with a creative perspective and innovation-powered enterprising spirit with a focus on digital technology and systems,” Kwon said in his New Year’s address for 2022 on Jan. 3.
Kwon looked back on the previous year. “The year of 2021 was full of very meaningful attempts and achievements. The VG Group settled early in the field and laid the solid foundation for successful strategy promotion in 2021,” he said.
Thanks to employees’ dedication and efforts, Woori Bank achieved digital innovation, strong profitability, and qualitative growth, Kwon said.
On top of that, outside organizations heaped praise on Woori Bank. They included S&P and Fitch, two of the world’s top three credit rating agencies.
The two credit rating agencies raised Woori Bank’s credit ratings by one notch.
“Once again, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all employees who made 2021 a wonderful year for Woori Bank,” Kwon said. “But we are entering an era of uncertainties due to the prolonged COVID-19, global instability and the acceleration of tapering due to inflation pressure.”
An era of new competition has arrived in the banking industry at the beginning of the new year due to the spread of digital innovation finance and the Big Blur phenomenon led by big tech companies.
“Legacy banks and big tech and fintech are no longer the only competitors of us,” Kwon said. “Now every company that makes customers convenient is our competitor. Let’s get out of the box and go out to the wide-open sea.”
As management strategy in 2022, Kwon proposed strengthening control of platforms, bringing innovation to its banking business and expanding the foundation for sustainable growth.
“The most urgent task at the moment is to preoccupy the MyData market and get our hands on customer data as much as possible,” Kwon said.
“The more data we have, the more differentiated customer insights we will able to obtain. Finally, we will be able to further provide more competitive, hyper-personalized products and services.”
“We need to find a way out of existing supplier-centered thinking and find all answers from thorough customer-centeredness,” Kwon continued.
“This is none other than essential competitiveness that platform companies have to secure. It will be a very important watershed for determining our success or failure as a customer-centered financial platform company.”
Kwon also hinted at forging a partnership with BaaS (Banking as a Service) and heterogeneous platforms to sharpen the bank’s competitiveness.
“We need to upgrade the bank’s powerful weapon, face-to-face channels and empower customers to conveniently use Woori Bank services in all channels including non-face-to-face channels and omnichannels,” Kwon said. “To this end, we need to innovatively strengthen our basic competitiveness as a bank.”
To this end, Woori Bank will expand the size of WON Concierge and innovate face-to-face channels using digital desks.
At the same time, it will provide customers with sophisticated and new customer experiences with hyper-personalized products and services.
Kwon also called on bank employees to predict and prepare for changes in market situations in advance.
“Each group ought to smoothly implement their plans in consideration of the expansion of corporate marketing to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), boosting the profitability and soundness of the global business and IB sectors and ending grace periods for the repayment of loans to companies hit hard by COVID-19,” he said.
In addition, Kwon mentioned the importance of strengthening corporate culture and capabilities.
He emphasized the need to strengthen a young and innovative corporate culture centered on implementation and employees’ professional capabilities and promised to give strong support to those who try to do so.
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