Keywords

1 Introduction

Internet primary banking was established after the development of information technology in the 1990s. One of the world’s first internet primary banks was the Security First Network Bank (SFNB), which was launched in October 1995 [1]. Internet primary banking benefits consumers by offering services at a low cost; the banks can offer higher rates to depositors while charging lower rates from borrowers. Furthermore, internet primary banks can easily enter new markets and grow rapidly by using the internet [2].

Kakao Bank, a major internet primary bank in South Korea, gained wide consumer appeal after being launched on South Korea’s highly accessible chat app Kakao talk, which has 42 million users among the country’s 50 million population. Kakao Bank secured two million accounts in two weeks. In addition, the deposit amount has reached 1 trillion won and loans amounting to 600 billion won have been awarded [3]. This study investigates the issues of internet primary banks, analyzes positive and negative opinions of them, and seeks to determine the subsequent policy implications.

2 Method

This study analyzes positive and negative expressions through opinion mining of online texts from major newspapers and social media. Opinion mining analyzes people’s opinions, appraisals, attitudes, and emotions regarding entities, individuals, issues, events, topics, and their attributes. This method analyzes sentence structure and separates facts and opinions by dividing them into positive or negative to measure their intensity [4]. Text data for 2017 were collected with Trendup 3.0, a platform of a major data analysis company in Korea. The numbers of texts in the data include 171,765 online newspaper articles and 152,445 social media posts. Opinion mining is analyzed with R 3.4.1.

3 Results

The results are summarized as follows:

First, social media buzz peaked in the period near the launch of the internet primary bank in July 2017, as shown in Fig. 1. Overall, more positive than negative words were used regarding Kakao Bank for one year (Fig. 2). However, the negative buzz in social media has rapidly increased since the bank opened.

Fig. 1.
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Buzz for Kakao Bank

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Fig. 2.
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Opinion mining of online news data and social data

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Second, opinion mining produced the top 10 most frequently expressed positive and negative words in online newspapers and social media as shown in Table 1. The positive words are similar in the two data sources. The most highly expressed positive word in online newspapers was “New” and that in social media was “Convenient.” However, the negative words expressed in social media are much more severe than those in online newspapers, as illustrated in Table 1 and Fig. 3.

Table 1. Opinion mining
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Fig. 3.
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Word cloud

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Third, the negative words in online newspapers are revealing the company’s perspective, while those in social media are revealing the consumer’s perspective, as illustrated in Figs. 4 and 5. Before the launch of the internet primary bank (first to second quarter), negative words related to concerns about the introduction of a new financial technology were seen. After the launch, the negative words are similar in online news data, but social data result is different. Compared to pre-third quarter, consumers have been experiencing negative attributes such as “discomfort,” “worry,” and “difficulty.” According to the results from the fourth quarter of last year, “swindler” appeared. As the popularity of Kakao Bank grows, consumers’ concerns are growing over the abuse of Kakao Bank accounts.

Fig. 4.
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Sentimental analysis on online news of quarterly

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Fig. 5.
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Sentimental analysis on social media of quarterly

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4 Conclusion

These results imply that this internet primary bank had more positive than negative expressions on online news and social media. It had the properties of new, convenient, and quick as advantages. However, it had worry, controversy, and illegal as disadvantages, which have been interpreted as expressing concern over new technologies. Based on the results of this study, the keywords of disadvantages of internet primary banks can be considered to design these banking services and to develop future marketing communications. Particularly, the result shows that consumers have negative perception about internet primary banks regarding the possibilities of unjustifiable transactions and confusing user experiences. In this regard, more reliable features of internet primary banking services need to be developed to lessen consumers’ concerns about the services.