AI가 대신한 “금리 낮춰주세요”…16만명, 1인당 이자 61만원 아꼈다

A new service, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), has helped 160,000 people significantly reduce their average interest burden of 61 million won each over the past five months. The service was introduced after the financial sector identified the increases in customers' earnings and assets, as well as improvements in their creditworthiness.

Financial authorities announced this development in their "AI Era MyData Development Plan" on the 25th. MyData is a service that allows users to consolidate their credit information scattered among various financial institutions into one place for easy retrieval and management. Implemented since January 2022, the service previously focused on displaying users' assets and loan status.

To address this limitation, the financial authorities began a pilot run of an "AI-powered interest rate reduction request execution service" in February of this year. The service uses MyData to detect increases in customers' income and assets or improvements in their creditworthiness and then requests a reduction in interest rates on behalf of the customer from the lending institution.

As of July, about 407,000 people had requested the service, with 16,200 of them benefiting from a total of 1,003 billion won (average 61 million won per person) in interest rate reductions. The financial authorities plan to expand the scope of MyData service providers' rights to act on behalf of consumers. Potential expansions include the right to request debt adjustment, voice fraud victim claims, various policy-related fund or advance loan requests, card payment fee or annual fee reductions, hidden insurance claim search, and claim processes.

AI systems will also have to explain their judgment and execution process. They must inform consumers about the AI's involvement in executing the requests, the financial institutions they were requested on behalf of, the information provided to those institutions, and the results of the execution. If a financial institution denies a request, the AI system must explain the reason.

The authorities also plan to broaden the scope of MyData to include individual entrepreneurs. Currently, data providers can only transmit personal information due to a restriction in the credit information law. However, the financial authorities intend to broaden the scope to include all credit information providers and allow them to transmit business-related information such as sales, payments, transaction items, tax filing and payment records, and closure information in one go.