Hana Financial Group Chairman Ham Young-joo, center, poses with other participants during a ceremony to mark the announcement of the Hana Finance AI Ethics Code at the group's headquarters in Seoul, Wednesday. Courtesy of Hana Financial Group

Hana Financial Group announced a set of ethical guidelines aimed at capitalizing on fast-growing artificial intelligence (AI) technology and offering more secure, customer-oriented financial services, Wednesday.

Tentatively translated as Hana Finance AI Ethics Code, it prioritizes five groups of values. They are inclusiveness and fairness, security and responsibility, transparency, data management and privacy protection.

The code comes as AI is reshaping the era of digital transformation and there is a growing need to counter its possible interference in privacy and civil liberties.

“AI is blending into our daily lives fast, and the finance industry where AI-centered digitization is accelerating is no exception,” Hana Financial Group Chairman Ham Young-joo said.

“With our AI ethics code, Hana Financial Group will enhance our capacity on AI-based financial services that customers, employees and other involved parties can fully rely on.”

The chairman expressed hope that the company, in the long term, will “play a leading role” in the AI industry and digital finance.

Of the five values, the company picked inclusiveness and fairness to ensure no clients are discriminated against in using digital banking services.

With security and responsibility, the firm also wants to make sure that the development of AI-based services does not put customers at risk.

The company came up with the value of transparency with a goal of developing trustworthy and easy-to-understand AI-based services.

Through data management, Hana Financial Group wants to protect data as it is “the centerpiece of AI operation.”

The company said privacy protection is underlined to protect all customers' data from being exploited.

Meanwhile, the banking group also launched the Hana AI Leaders' Forum, in a bid to facilitate discussion among executives of the group's affiliates on AI-related issues.

The forum will be held once every quarter.

The company has been stepping up efforts to cope with AI over the years. For instance, it promoted an AI task force as a regular team, and a data management body was expanded to cover AI.