Hyundai Card is beginning to reap the rewards of more than a decade of investment in data and artificial intelligence (AI). By reprocessing scattered payment data into a language AI can analyze, the company has sharpened its customer targeting and cut campaign design time from several days to around an hour. Hyundai Card plans to leverage these technical capabilities to advance its own AI platform and expand its network of partners, strengthening its identity as a "tech company."
According to the financial industry Friday, Hyundai Card is using its proprietary AI platform "UNIVERSE" for core tasks such as marketing and risk management. Universe is equipped with "Mother AI," which identifies customer groups, and "Allocation AI," which efficiently distributes marketing resources.
Mother AI combines customer consumption data in various ways to identify groups most likely to respond to a particular promotion. When a person designs marketing for an online grocery mall, they tend to stop at relatively intuitive conditions such as "customers with children" or "customers who make frequent online payments." AI, by contrast, analyzes seemingly unrelated factors such as auto financing usage history and travel spending tendencies to find more effective combinations. According to Hyundai Card, this approach raised promotion response rates by up to sixfold compared with conventional targeting.
Allocation AI calculates where limited marketing resources such as coupons or points should be distributed to yield the greatest results. For example, if only one of a fuel, beauty, or coffee coupon can be offered to one million customers, Mother AI first selects the customer groups most likely to respond to each coupon, and Allocation AI optimizes the overall distribution. Through this, campaign design time, which previously took up to about three days, was shortened to 20 to 40 minutes.
Behind these results is the data structuring work Hyundai Card has steadily pursued. Since declaring "Digital Hyundai Card" in 2015, the company has invested more than 1 trillion won in AI and data science. Of that, about 500 billion won was spent on organizing data into a form that AI can read and judge.
A representative outcome is the "PDI tag" system. It is a structure that converts vast consumption information, such as card payment records, location, and time of day, into indicators showing a customer's tendencies and behavioral characteristics. The P tag refers to source behavioral data such as payment region and time of day, while the D tag is an index that estimates specific consumption tendencies or the likelihood of future behavior based on this. The I tag combines multiple D tags according to marketing objectives and is used to find the actual target customer group.
Hyundai Card Vice Chairman Chung Tae-young is known to have put weight on data structuring, believing that traditional customer classification by gender, age, and occupation alone cannot keep pace with segmented consumption preferences. His judgment is that a financial company's competitiveness improves only when it can interpret the payment data a card company holds with precision and make different offers to each customer.
Hyundai Card is expanding these data and AI capabilities to the next stage. While the existing Universe was a platform supporting individual marketing tasks, "Universe 2.0," which the company plans to pursue, is closer to an agent AI system that helps companies set goals and establish execution strategies. If a company asks, "Which customers should we target to increase sales this year?" the AI derives the task and proposes the target customer group, campaign methods, and even resource allocation plans.
The company is also preparing "Universe for Partners," an AI package dedicated to partner firms. Even without adopting the entire platform, as Japan's Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company (SMCC) has, companies can select and use only the AI models they need. Partner firms' data is organized into Hyundai Card's PDI tag system, and AI models are applied according to each company's marketing objectives.
Performance indicators are also improving. Hyundai Card's membership rose from 11.04 million in 2022 to 12.67 million last year. Over the same period, its share of individual credit sales rose from 16% to 17.5%. The card industry is paying attention to how Hyundai Card is expanding AI not merely as a tool for improving work efficiency but as a new revenue model. "While it is common for card companies to use AI for marketing and screening, Hyundai Card stands out in that it built its own platform and even connected it to overseas exports," one card industry official said.
