IBK ONE Notification (mobile app.) Qorus Banking Innovation Awards 2013

Korean bank customers had to pay monthly fee ($0.30 ~ $0.60) to receive account activity and credit card approval notification by SMS, and only VIPs are waived of this fee. Recent Smartphone development introduced the push technology as alternative to SMS and it has got the consumers’ attention. IBK ONE Notification uses push technology to provide same or more information on account activity and credit card approval for free of charge than SMS method. This is the first financial service that used push technology in Korea and there are only three similar services from banks as of August 2013. We are planning to launch IBK ONE Notification for global next year. IBK used push technology to provide high value to our customer, with little internal system resource. We focused on the most frequent request, account activity inquiry and credit card approval. IBK ONE Notification user can enjoy various kind of information than existing SMS service free of charge. On its launch, without any PR, customer viral led to 280,000 subscribers. This number easily takes up 20% of total SMS subscriber, but the interesting fact is that those who use IBK ONE Notification are not the existing SMS user. This means IBK ONE Notification acquired new customers who want good service, not those from internal shift. In result, customers who are reluctant to use SMS are satisfied and locked-in to IBK ONE Notification. Thus every time the push arrives and the app is opened, IBK ONE brand is exposed and our First-mover strategy also increases IBK’s brand power. The most important effect it brought is that SMS cost is actually saved $400K/year as waived VIPs move to a new service from SMS. It won the several awards so far: IBK TOP 5 hit service in 2011, Korea App Award 2011, Korea Internet Eco Award 2012 and two business model patents were applied in 2011 and 2012.