Shinhan Card In-house Venture Launches Shopping Information Subscription Platform 'Before Shopping'

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[Asia Economy Reporter Ki Ha-young] Shinhan Card announced on the 14th that the in-house venture team ‘Adventure,’ which participated as the 4th cohort of the in-house startup support program ‘I’m Ventures’ last year, officially launched the shopping information subscription platform ‘B4Shopping’.

B4Shopping is a service that collects shopping information from various channels such as social networking services (SNS), messengers, text messages, and websites, and categorizes them with hashtags to provide to customers.

Using hashtags, customers can view and subscribe to various event and discount information such as limited editions and time sales by topic or brand at a glance. For example, customers interested in coffee can receive information only about desired products through the ‘#coffee’ hashtag, and those interested in games can do so through the ‘#game’ hashtag.

Additionally, the Adventure team developed and applied for a patent for a function that allows subscription by combining hashtags. Customers interested in limited edition sneakers can combine the ‘#limitededition’ and ‘#sneakers’ hashtags to receive shopping information only about limited edition sneakers.

They plan to activate the service through the development of a hyper-personalized recommendation service combined with Shinhan Card data, subscription to hashtags from various partners, and partnership marketing that sends coupons. They intend to develop partnership models through Shinhan Card’s artificial intelligence (AI) team and All That Shopping and expand these to partner companies.

The Adventure team developed B4Shopping using the lean startup method. The lean startup approach involves quickly releasing a prototype to analyze customer behavior patterns and incorporating feedback into the development of the official version.

The prototype of B4Shopping, launched in the second half of last year, was installed by 3,500 customers, three times more than planned, and recorded a weekly growth rate of over 10% until the official version was released, successfully concluding the project.

Meanwhile, Shinhan Card has continuously discovered new businesses through the in-house venture system since 2016, and since 2018, it has operated a startup support program called I’m Ventures that collaborates not only with in-house ventures but also with external startups. This aligns with Shinhan Financial Group’s strategy to build an innovation growth ecosystem.

Shinhan Card is recruiting the 5th cohort of in-house ventures until the 29th and is also seeking startups to jointly carry out projects with Shinhan Card in fields such as payment and remittance, authentication and security, AI and big data, and new finance and auto. They plan to promote various support programs such as mentoring and equity investment to discover future collaboration models.

A Shinhan Card official said, “Based on the innovation growth strategy pursued by Shinhan Financial Group, we will continue efforts to establish an organizational culture where creativity can flourish and to revitalize the domestic startup market.”

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