Hana Bank employees take a finance class organized by their firm in the metaverse. (Hana Bank)
South Korea’s Hana Bank said Friday it has launched a special task force to foster businesses and attract younger customers in the virtual metaverse.
Hana’s decision comes as local commercial banks have been hopping on the metaverse bandwagon as they believe it will become a financial landscape where millennials and Generation Z will actively engage in.
The task force will review cooperation with local tech businesses, offering related services and seminars for its private banking customers, building metaverse platforms both online and offline and designing financial services based on virtual reality.
Hana said that it has been using metaverse-based digital applications in intracompany meetings and activities to help its employees better understand the concept.
Hana Bank CEO Park Sung-ho last month interacted with new entry-level employees in a virtual world using Zepeto, Naver’s metaverse app.
Park and the employees took a tour of the virtually-built Hana Global Campus, which is based on the bank’s human resources training center in Cheongna, Incheon. The metaverse interaction was a solution to this year’s canceled offline training session for entry-level staff, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The launch of the task force is for the firm to better understand the minds of our millennial and Gen Z customers,” a Hana official said in a statement.
“We plan to make this a long-term goal and pursue different projects in stages beyond the initial financial industry’s plan to use metaverse as a business branch or a meeting ground,” the official added.
Hana Bank’s net profit for the first half of the year gained 17.9 percent on-year to 1.2 trillion won ($1.1 billion).
According to consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, the global metaverse market is expected to grow from $45.5 billion in 2019 to $1.5 trillion by 2030.