South Korean operator SK Telecom will partner with British multinational financial services company Standard Chartered Bank to launch a cloud system for the banking sector, according to a report. The system, called MyData, will be designed to collect private credit information dispersed throughout various financial firms and allow users to access them from a single platform.
The two companies have agreed to develop a storage system within Standard Chartered Bank Korea’s cloud service to store MyData and other information on private asset management and solution analysis. SK Telecom plans to work with local cloud consulting firm Bespin Global and U.S.-based Microsoft to set up a cloud on Microsoft’s Azure and launch the service in July.
SK Telecom plans to set up infrastructure for the cloud and the MyData analysis program to allow Standard Chartered to collect and analyze personal data and to offer new services. The operator will also support the bank to meet cloud compliance requirements and offer upgrades to the financial institution’s mobile banking system by the end of October.
Tarifica’s Take
Collaborations between mobile operators and the banking sector have become quite popular and take a number of forms, most notably mobile money platforms and mobile-linked lending services. These are consumer-oriented products. However, the growing convergence between the mobile telecom and financial-services worlds includes more advanced and larger-scaled business-oriented products such as the one being developed by SK Telecom.
As in many other areas of value-added non-traditional services, a partnership with a specialized company is invaluable for this project; without the expertise of such partners, it would be impossible for MNOs to create products of a sufficiently high level of quality and relevance to be competitive in the marketplace.
In the case of MyData, the product is aimed not at banking customers but at the banks themselves, and it leverages the power of cloud computing and SK’s network to make a vast amount of credit data available to financial institutions in a streamlined fashion. Making disparate data from various different firms accessible via a single platform could very well be game-changing for banks, and the fact that a telecom operator could get the credit for it—not to mention the revenue—is very significant. It shows that by providing the means of channeling and disseminating the data, operators can be important players at the highest levels of the banking ecosystem globally.
Of course, MyData does not actually exist yet, so much remains to be seen. But the partners are major forces in their respective fields, and when the product is ready for the market, it will very likely make an immediate impact. As for the farther future, Standard Chartered’s intention to use customer data to determine which further services will be developed points the direction that this technology is likely to take.