Hyundai Card AI 'Universe', The Secret Behind Breaking into the Japanese Market for the First Time

'Universe' Contract Signed... Hundreds of Billions Won Scale
10 Years of Effort Since Digital Full-Scale Launch in 2015
"Proving Global Competitiveness as a Tech Company"

Hyundai Card has signed a sales contract for the artificial intelligence (AI) software 'Universe' with SMCC, one of Japan's top three credit card companies, based on data capabilities accumulated over 10 years. This is the first time a domestic financial company has successfully exported AI software developed independently.

According to Hyundai Card on the 24th, SMCC conducted a local pilot test of Universe in Japan for six months from February to August and analyzed the results. Executives visited Hyundai Card in Korea several times. Initially, SMCC was skeptical about Universe, but after long-term verification with Hyundai Card and Universe, they confirmed the service's performance and stability and reportedly agreed to adopt it.

Universe is a data science-based customer hyper-personalization AI platform developed by Hyundai Card. Its core feature is the ability to analyze users' payment data and classify them in detail according to individual behaviors and tendencies. It has the advantage of focusing on user groups with specific behavioral patterns beyond the conventional unified user classification system based on gender and age. The scale of this Universe sales contract amounts to several tens of billions of Korean won, which the company describes as the largest single AI software export in Korean history.

Vice Chairman Jung Tae-young of Hyundai Card (right) and Yukihiko Onishi, President of SMCC, are taking a commemorative photo after signing the agreement at the SMCC headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, on the afternoon of the 16th.
[Image source=Hyundai Card]

This achievement is analyzed to have been possible because Hyundai Card has built data capabilities over about 10 years. Since fully launching its digital business in 2015, Hyundai Card has created more than 2,000 data science-based collaboration cases with private label credit card (PLCC) partners. It has also successfully launched PLCCs with global brands such as Costco and Starbucks, and in 2022, it formed a data science-based marketing partnership with the influential American daily newspaper The New York Times (NYT). Last year, it also established a 'strategic business partnership' with the global payment technology company Visa, jointly promoting data business based on data assets and analytical technology.

Hyundai Card established ties with the Japanese credit card market in 2022 by exporting the credit card IT system 'H-ALIS' to the local comprehensive payment service provider GMO Payment Gateway (PG). H-ALIS safely processes hundreds of millions of card transactions in real time every month and simultaneously handles large-scale purchasing, sales, deposits, and withdrawals. In particular, the system can be flexibly reconfigured and applied according to customer and product characteristics, enabling quick responses even when new products are introduced.

A Hyundai Card official said, "The Japanese market, which strongly prioritizes quality, is not easy to enter unless service performance and stability are guaranteed," adding, "This achievement demonstrates that Hyundai Card has the technological capability to compete in the global market as a tech company."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.