Thousands of financial products are available in South Korea for consumers, but which one is best suited to one’s needs and how effective is it cost wise? To resolve these questions Rainist, a startup, has created a financial recommendation service called BankSalad.
Financial Management just with a click
The company believes that the future of financial product market lies in personalised service offers to customers and so with sophisticated data and algorithm based financial product curation, Rainist offers the definitive choice for financial products. BankSalad is a personal financial management service that helps the user select and manage financial products.
BankSalad offers recommendations about credit cards and other financial products, based on the user’s financial status and spending habits. The platform can link user’s bank accounts and credit cards to track expenses, income, bills and savings, which also helps in making budgeting easy.
BankSalad is available as a website and also as a mobile app. The website was launched in 2014 also lists top-10 products sorted by advantages. The mobile app, which was launched in 2017, offers an automatic compilation of user’s assets using data mining techniques. The website had over 1 million monthly active users, while the mobile app was downloaded over 1 million times in the first 10 months, according to Rainist.
Strong database and honest recommendations
BankSalad’s recommendations are based on over 5,900 financial products, including 3,600 credit cards, deposits, savings and loans across 20 major banks, 18 credit card companies and 11 security companies. The FinTech startup that was founded in 2012 by industrious entrepreneurs Park Kyu-in and Kim Tae-hoon. The team initially had manually compiled the database of financial products across South Korea. The FinTech has collaborated with many partners from the IBK Corporate Bank Card referral solution creation to the KT CLiP app card data partnership.
The company earns its revenue through commissions from financial companies when users of BankSalad sign up with them on the platform’s recommendation. BankSalad’s services for consumers are free, but there are plans to roll out premium services.
The startup had raised US$1.76 million in the seed round funding. In October 2018, Rainist closed a 14 billion won or US$12.29 million Series B funding. Company K Partners, Dunamu & Partners, Atinum Investment, KB Investment, Murex Partners and Bass Investment participated in the funding. The startup has secured total of US$16.7 million of funding. The company plans to use the funds to develop services and boost customer marketing.
