GoBear Vietnam launches new financial comparison services

Bao Nguyen, GoBear Vietnam Country director

The user-oriented platform of GoBear neither aggregates nor sells products, it simply offers consumers a free comparison process based on their financial needs. VIR discusses with Bao Nguyen, GoBear Vietnam country director the company’s new products plan and his vision for financial inclusion.

GoBear Vietnam has just launched three new products at the same time. What is the roadmap for new products for the rest of this year?

By the end of 2018, we look forward to adding more products to our platform. Next will be life insurance. Different from other types of general insurance, consumers often find it quite hard and time consuming to search for the right life insurance plan, especially when the benefits of more than one family member have to be taken into consideration.

GoBear Vietnam will offer a free and transparent comparison of life insurance plans available on the market, and users can find a range of products that match their specific needs in seconds.

You have had five new product launches in 2018 and expect to have at least one more before the year is over. What is the motivation behind this aggressive expansion?

Despite being one of the group’s newer market entries, GoBear Vietnam has demonstrated consistent development in a number of business criteria throughout the past year. As of today, we are landing over two million monthly page views and one million monthly users on the website www.gobear.com/vn.

The key priority is now to broaden the variety of the products on our comparison platform as we continuously look to enhance the seamless user experience, with advanced search and filter options to help users find the best products.

We also plan to integrate a personal pre-approval feature to improve financial inclusion and financial access for our users. Our ultimate goal is to improve the standards of living for Vietnamese people that have limited access to mainstream financial services.

How will the integration of a personal pre-approval feature benefit Vietnamese users and improve financial inclusion?

Improving financial inclusion and serving the unbanked consumers is very important in an emerging market like Vietnam. The unavailability of credit risk information is a significant problem as it can substantially restrict the flow of capital to would-be entrepreneurs and small businesses.

And we all know there is a big pool of unbanked consumers in Vietnam with no formal credit histories. They have little in terms of a personal banking history from which lenders, including commercial banks and finance companies, can determine creditworthiness should they request a loan.

To solve this problem, the personal pre-approval feature will use non-traditional data and predictive data analytics, which are gathered from the consumers’ unique digital footprint, to produce highly predictive digital credit scorecards that enable them to access financial services. For financial institutions, this feature will help them to further expand their pool of customers while keeping risks in check.

With the planned personal pre-approval feature, GoBear will not only enable our users to access useful and affordable financial products that meet their needs in a timely manner, but also help our partners to better serve the underprivileged.

We understand that data collection is essential in order to provide users better access to financial products. From your perspective, how should financial technology be made safe for the Vietnamese users?

We have to admit that with innovation, however, comes risk. No one should assume that technology is 100 per cent safe. Data security and privacy are one of our biggest priorities. As a company that prides itself on service and data integrity, we have robust data policies and infrastructure to keep our users’ data private and secure, and will do everything we can to make sure the data stays safe with us.