Collaborating with Toyota’s Connected Car

LINE has drawn a plan for company growth around AI technology and loan business, which will be the new pillars of business. It is unhesitantly investing 30 billion yen in 2018 to develop a monetary service and a unique AI Engine, and is launching other services in order to advance into a cashless society and connected cars. It aims to make LINE become a part of one’s daily life other than just an application on smartphones as it currently is.   

Utilizing Current Strengths

Takeshi Idezawa, the Chairman of LINE, talked about the company’s business growth guidelines or “ReDesign” plan that it will bring the 7 years of LINE into a new era. Currently, there are 75 million LINE users in Japan. The great number of users is the strength that LINE is going to use as the foundation of its financial service business. 

Lead with the Revolutions

Currently, through LINE Pay, LINE provides the payment service on smartphones for both online and in-store transactions. Mr. Hisahiro Nagafuku, Director of LINE Pay has announced to “revolutionize LINE to be the leader,” aiming to reach over 1 million merchant stores that can accept payments via LINE Pay in Japan by the end of 2018.  

However, there are other companies having entered the financial service via smartphones such as Rakuten (the pioneer in Japan under “Rakuten Pay”), Yahoo, and NTT DOCOMO. It is therefore expected that LINE’s entry will result in an even fiercer competition. LINE has partnered with “QUICPay,” a digital financial service backed by JCB, making it possible for consumers to pay through LINE all the 720,000 franchised stores in Japan by just scanning QR Code as they have been accustomed to. Yet, LINE is aiming to improve further, with the user’s convenience in mind, to enable users to pay without the smartphone’s presence by the end of this year.  

In addition, LINE has lowered the merchant requirements to promote the payment service and attract more SME companies to use by merely downloading the application specifically for merchants. There will be no transaction fees for three years, starting this August.  

LINE’s President Idezawa gave an opinion on the financial service in Japan that “If it is inconvenient for the users, they will leave us.” He also showed the determination to get the foundation of financial service ready the soonest. 

Collaborating with Clova

In AI service, LINE has decided to partner with Clova, a developer of speech recognition AI, in order to work with Toyota’s new model of vehicles planned to launch this winter. Mr. Jun Masuda, LINE’s Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer, said that “the environment inside a car is most viable for speech recognition.” The speech recognition AI is developed to enable the driver to give voice commands to turn on/off lights at home, send messages and other functions via LINE while driving. LINE will continue to partner with Clova so that Toyota will select LINE as the in-car service provider for later models. 

Utilizing its broad customer base, LINE has sprinted into the financial and automotive industries. However, what the outcomes will be is something we need to wait another year and see.