Shinhan Financial Group (055550.KS), Korea's second-largest financial holding company by assets, will relaunch its all-in-one "Super SOL" platform on June 17, but the new version quietly concedes that its first attempt missed. Rather than maintain a standalone super-app, Shinhan is embedding card, securities and insurance functions directly into SOL Bank, its highest-traffic banking app, according to Chosun Biz, which reported the plan citing financial-industry sources.
For a portfolio manager watching Korea's four banking groups, the immediate question is not whether super-apps matter — it is which platform is actually winning the engagement race, and whether Shinhan's reversal is an admission that its 2023 super-app failed. The monthly-active-user (MAU) scoreboard answers both.
The numbers behind the pivot
Shinhan first launched Super SOL in 2023 as a separate app bundling its bank, card, securities and insurance affiliates. The problem, per Chosun Biz: customers who wanted to actually transact were frequently bounced back into the individual affiliate apps, blunting the "one app" promise. The usage gap shows it. In the first quarter of 2026, Super SOL drew 1.84 million MAU, while SOL Bank and the SOL Pay payments app each held roughly 10 million users, according to Chosun Biz.
Faced with that disparity, Shinhan concluded it was more effective to rebuild the widely used SOL Bank into a universal app than to keep nurturing a separate super-app. A Shinhan Bank official told Digital Today the firm will continue expanding benefits and services so customers can use Shinhan Financial Group's financial and lifestyle services more easily and conveniently. In other words, the company is meeting users where they already are.
Samsung shuts its affiliate apps the same month
The timing is not coincidental. Samsung's financial affiliates — Samsung Card, Samsung Life Insurance and Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance — will discontinue their own apps on June 28 and migrate core functions into Monimo, the group's integrated finance platform, according to Chosun Biz. Samsung Card and Samsung Life's own user notices confirm the June 28, 2026 shutdown date. Monimo lets users view affiliate accounts in one place and offers "Moni Money," prepaid points usable across the group, per Chosun Biz.
The standard to beat
KB Financial Group (105560.KS), Korea's largest banking group by assets, set the template. It built its integrated platform around KB Star Banking in 2021 and reported 14.16 million MAU at the end of last year — the most of any commercial-bank app in Korea, according to Chosun Biz. That figure is consistent with the app's documented trajectory: Amazon Web Services, KB's cloud partner, cited 11 million MAU for the Star Banking super-app back in June 2023. Woori Financial Group, another of Korea's big-four groups, followed in 2024 by recasting Woori WON Banking as a group-wide platform spanning bank, card, securities and capital units, Chosun Biz reported.
That history frames the stakes: KB's engagement lead was built over four years of integration, and Shinhan's standalone super-app — launched two years after KB's — never closed the gap. Folding everything into SOL Bank is Shinhan's attempt to compete on the metric KB already dominates.
What to watch
The confirming data point is straightforward: the MAU trajectory of the rebuilt SOL Bank after June 17, and of Monimo after Samsung's affiliate apps go dark on June 28. If Shinhan's consolidated app lifts engagement toward KB Star Banking's tier without degrading transaction speed — the trade-off a financial-industry source flagged to Chosun Biz, noting that packing more functions into one app can slow it down — the pivot will look vindicated. If MAU stalls near the combined base it already had, the relaunch will read as a repackaging rather than a breakthrough. Quarterly MAU disclosures through the second half of 2026 will settle it.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Figures are sourced from the cited reporting as of publication and may change.
