Kakao Stock is the baby of a significant marriage
Kakao Stock, a leading mobile service for stock trading in Korea, is operated by Dunamu, a Korean mobile fintech company. After dominating the market with its messenger app KakaoTalk, Kakao made a strategic investment of USD 2.5M (KRW 3B) in Dunamu in September 2015. At that time, Dunamu had already been operating a mobile trading app for Kakao since 2014. The two companies jointly established a stock-financial service, Kakao Stock, to provide an integrated financial service optimized for mobile platform use through achieving synergies with other services and capabilities already offered by both Kakao and Dunamu.
Thanks to its social elements, such as sharing information regarding which stocks one’s KakaoTalk friends have invested in, Kakao Stock has seen rapid growth in its transaction size and user base. Kakao Stock announced that the cumulative transaction value had exceeded KRW 20 trillion in June, 2017.
By the same time, Kakao Stock claimed its cumulative downloads had reached 1.85 million with an average monthly transaction amount of KRW 1.2 trillion. Also, by then, there were approximately 220,000 average daily active users (DAU) and approximately 310,000 average monthly active users (MAU).
Categorically speaking, as of June, Kakao Stock’s user distribution was 73.5% male and 26.5% female. Looking at age distribution, around 26.9% of the users were in their 30’s, 25.6% in their 40’s, followed by those in their 20’s at 20.8% and in their 50’s at 14.3%.
Moreover, Kakao Stock now boasts a great variety of affiliates. In August 2014, they only had three brokerage houses as their partners but, now, they have partnered with 11 securities brokers, including Kiwoom, Mirae Asset Daewoo, Yuanta, and Korea Investment & Securities.
Aside from basic stock-financial services, Kakao Stock also provides users with premium stock information services such as diagnosis using machine learning technology and investment strategy reports. Recently, the company launched Kakao Stock Map (MAP), a discretionary investment management service. People can now entrust the choice of which stocks to buy and sell to the professional investment advisory set up within Kakao Stock. People say that this service greatly lowers the high threshold of stock-trading knowledge required for the general public.
(Top photo from 58pic.com)
This article, entitled “South Korea’s top mobile stock trading app, Kakao Stock made breakthrough”, was written in Korean by Minjung Kim of Platum, edited by AllTechAsia.