Integrated finance app 'Super SOL' takes center stage
Matching game, coffee and points perks draw visitors
Oh Geon-young headlines speaker lineup
"You mean I can buy stocks directly from my bank account — without transferring money to a separate brokerage account?"
The Shinhan Financial Group booth at Herald Money Festa 2026, held Friday and Saturday at Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul, combined financial service demonstrations with hands-on events. Visitors received guided introductions to the SOL LINK account and the Super SOL app, and took part in a picture-matching game.
Now in its third year, Herald Money Festa 2026 ran under the theme "Money Rebalancing: Recalibrating the Weight of Your Assets." Lectures covering stocks, ETFs, real estate, gold, virtual assets, wealth management, and tax and inheritance planning drew strong crowds, offering visitors a chance to reassess their portfolios amid a rapidly shifting investment landscape.
The booth showcased Super SOL, Shinhan Financial Group's integrated finance platform that brings banking, brokerage, credit card and insurance services together in a single app, allowing users to handle all their financial needs in one place without switching between subsidiary apps.
The booth also featured Shinhan SOL LINK, the group's flagship product designed to break down the barrier between banking and brokerage. SOL LINK is a hybrid account that combines standard deposit and withdrawal functions with stock-trading capabilities in a single account, letting customers put their deposited funds to work in the market immediately — no separate brokerage account or fund transfer required.
Domestic stock trading fees stand at 0.01 percent and overseas stock fees at 0.07 percent, both the lowest in the industry. The product was developed to capture growing "money-move" demand — the desire to shift investment funds quickly — by eliminating the inconvenience of moving money back and forth between bank and brokerage accounts as market activity picks up.
Events encouraging visitors to sign up for Super SOL ran alongside the booth. Outside the main venue, at the shared-growth financial market, first-time Super SOL users this year could spin an in-app roulette wheel after logging in to win a Mega Coffee iced Americano coupon. New sign-ups received a Naver Pay points coupon worth 10,000 won ($7).
A picture-matching game on one side of the booth drew a steady stream of visitors. Players had to rotate tiles within a time limit to find two or more matching pairs. As one participant flipped tiles on the blue square game board, friends alongside called out "here!" and "there!" to bursts of laughter. Prizes included bags, massage sticks and hand creams featuring the Shinhan Friends characters.
Shinhan Financial also drew on its wealth-management credentials by featuring Oh Geon-young, head of the Pathfinder division at Shinhan Bank, as a keynote speaker to outline investment strategy.
Speaking Friday on the theme "The Chaos Created by Trump 2.0 and Shifts in the Macro Environment," Oh said that keeping inflation low even during periods of growth requires a productivity revolution to sustain low interest rates. "If the AI revolution collapses, the debt problem will not be resolved either," he said. "State-level support for AI will continue."
He added that because investors cannot know which areas will improve, diversification remains essential. "If you take a long view, you should be putting your portfolio into AI," he said. He also cautioned that investors must not respond to a high-interest-rate environment the way they did when rates were low. "Remember that in times like these, holding cash can also increase in value," he said.
forest@heraldcorp.com
