Making sense of the world through data The focus of this blog is #data #bigdata #dataanalytics #privacy #digitalmarketing #AI #artificialintelligence #ML #GIS #datavisualization and many other aspects, fields and applications of data
Monday, July 22, 2019
Big Data Keeps Getting Bigger
The sun never sets on the creation of new data.
Authored by Jeff Desjardins via VisualCapitalist.com,
How can we grasp and understand big data?
This often seems to be a challenge especially for people who do not understand it... and nevertheless try to explain it to us!
This is the case here with a hodgepodge of disparate data sources and data usage packaged together in a colorful but not quite meaningful way to be impressive, leading to the wrong conclusion:
"Also, imagine how difficult it is to make sense of this swath of data. How does one even process insights from the many billions of Youtube videos watched per day?"
Well, no actually! With big data, it is the exact opposite: The more data you have, the easier it is to make sense of it!
And this is in fact relatively easy to understand: The more data you have, the easier it becomes to find patterns, trends and correlations.
Many companies struggle with their big data projects, often because the data is not big enough, and most often because it does not contains important clues or information preventing the right insight to be accessed.
So as the data flow increases, the difficulty is far more technical in a hardware kind of way than in the understanding of the data as implied in the article above.
But then, once you understand the contents comes of course the real challenge of our time: What to do with the data. This, more than being mesmerized by peta and exabytes is or should be the focus of our attention.
Saturday, July 20, 2019
'Stalling Markets': The Last Time This Happened Was October 1929
'Stalling Markets': The Last Time This Happened Was October 1929
Fri, 07/19/2019
Great article from GoldMoney, focusing on the US and the mercantilist policies of the Trump administration.It is unfortunate that China is not included in the broad picture as the Chinese economy is also slowing down fast with a highly leveraged financial system.
"History does not repeat, it rhymes!"
October 1929 it may not be but there can be little doubts that we are approaching a new paradigm.
The combination of American trade protectionism and the
end of a failing credit expansion is leading into a global economic downturn,
and potentially a systemic crisis. Meanwhile, investors still believe more extreme monetary
policies will stabilise economies and that the ultra-low interest rate
environment will persist without renewed price inflation. As Samuel Johnson
reputedly said of a second marriage, it represents the triumph of hope over
experience.
Introduction
There is a moment just after the top of every credit
cycle where positive momentum stalls before a new reality emerges. When the stall begins, as appears to be the
case today, everything is still read positively. Perennial bulls say “Don’t
worry, the central bank will reduce interest rates and inject enough money into
the banking system to ensure any recession will be minor and growth will
resume”. With interest rates falling, confidence in the final outcome means
stocks continue to rise. With this mindset, bad news for the economy is always
good news for stocks.
This investors’ paradise is populated by devotees of the
new economics, supporting progressively increased state intervention. They don’t actually believe that free markets
should set stock prices anymore and have become hooked on central banks
pursuing inflationary policies. In their minds, the relationship between
monetary inflation and rising stock prices amounts to a financial equivalent of
perpetual motion. However, their enduring belief in the might of central banks
and the importance they place on maintaining asset prices makes inflationists
blind to the message from stalling markets.
We all get caught up in it. And when evidence of the
stall in economic growth mounts, we clamour for lower interest rates, credit
expansion, and finally competitive exchange rates. Even President Trump is now
telling us the Fed must weaken the dollar to boost exports and the American
economy. As it is already doing his bidding with interest rates, surely the Fed
will oblige.
The naivety of this reasoning is endemic, and as a naïve
supporter of free markets, President Trump is beginning to trot it out again.
In Britain, the same old inflationist story, wrapped up in proposed tax cuts to
be paid for later by economic growth, is now being pushed by Boris Johnson,
almost certain to be the next Prime Minister. Let us hope this is just
electioneering rhetoric. But so widely are the myths of monetary stimulus
believed that they are now certain to be renewed in a push to sustain economic
growth.
That gold prices measured in dollars will be guaranteed
to rise is indirectly becoming officially sanctioned. Those of us in the gold business would be
grateful for President Trump’s endorsement of gold if it was not for the economic
consequences of his weak dollar policies on ordinary people whose money is
about to be trashed. Nevertheless, the gold price has now jumped to a new level
and markets are trying to discount the consequences of what is now unfolding.
As the gold price continues to rise, those who wonder whether it is worth
buying miss the point. It is not gold that rises, but their money that’s
falling. Money is falling because governments through more aggressive monetary
policies are about to deliberately undermine their own currencies.
The naivety over the consequences of weak money is not
restricted to the leaderships of the US and UK. The maintenance of negative
interest rates and bond yields in the EU and Japan are already testament to
that. But we now see two world
leaders (assuming Boris succeeds May) who indicate they are aware of the
failings of the economic establishment, but publicly endorsing the inflationism
that has been central to the establishment’s failure. By promising the tax jam
of today for a better outlook tomorrow, Boris Johnson is roughly where Trump
was before he was elected president. Let’s hope an enterprising journalist asks
him to clarify whether he thinks a lower sterling (which we already have) is
good for the economy. Very likely, he will agree, perhaps with the proviso that
price inflation remains under control.
Therefore, central banks are committed to address
stalling economic growth by snorting more of the drug that is giving us the
downer. But our leaders and
central bankers are ignorant of sound theories of money and credit and are
driven almost entirely by statistical information. And here we hit a further
problem. Government statistics are not fit for purpose.
Statistics are misleading
Statistically, inflation is under control, because the
statisticians with their methods have ensured it is so. In giving the central banks a passport to
accelerate the rate of monetary inflation by suppressing the consequences, they
are storing up trouble for us all. There will come a time when not even the
manipulation of consumer price statistics will hide the fact that the
purchasing powers of the dollar, sterling, euro and even the yen are all
falling at an alarming rate. It is when we begin to sense that this is a
problem that the stalling feeling turns our greed, or complacency, into concern
and then outright fear.
Exactly two hundred years ago, Lord Canning, who was
briefly prime minster of Great Britain, warned that you can prove anything with
statistics, except the truth. This was over a century before modern econometrics evolved to make
statistics more meaningful. But statisticians have missed what was behind
Canning’s point: statistics prove nothing because they cannot replace sound
reasoning. Instead, they only assume the relationships between cause and
effect. Rather than attempting to understand the manner of the link, their
approach is to monitor the relationship between monetary inflation and changes
in prices, to ensure that increases in the CPI remain within a target range. As
long as this is the case, monetary policy makers can carry on issuing money out
of thin air.
You cannot measure the general level of prices, because
it is a concept and not a fact. Strictly speaking, it is hardly a concept either, because it is not the
unmeasurable general level of prices that inflates, but the purchasing power of
the currency that diminishes. It may take time to work through, but if you
increase the quantity of unbacked state money and the bank credit in
circulation, a unit of currency will simply buy less.
Not enough recognition is given to the draining effect on
the productive members of society and their businesses. Monetary inflation
undermines the value of their earnings and profits, transferring wealth from
savers, and it impoverishes the poorest labourers for the benefit of government
finances.
Far from obtaining something for nothing, the government
gets its seigniorage by impoverishing the same people that pay its taxes. If one could measure the general level of
prices, it is more likely that they have been rising by between seven and ten
per cent annually for a considerable time, as illustrated by John Williams’s
ShadowStats, and confirmed by the Chapwood Index. The official two per cent
target is poppycock. If we assume the two independent calculations are more
realistic, US citizens have been getting collectively poorer every year since
the financial crisis of 2008/09. Not only is this evidence that Canning’s
aphorism about statistics telling us everything but the truth still holds, but
governments now fully depend on the concealment of the true state of affairs by
statistical suppression.
Governments have arrived at this point because funding
through inflation faces the law of diminishing returns. The more a government inflates, the more it
impoverishes its people. And the more the people are impoverished, the less
both taxes and inflationary financing yield. And as we look down from the
heights of inflated asset prices, the more evidence emerges that our economies
are stalling, the more important this will become.
With the establishment, investing institutions and
regular investors all being misled by official statistics, it is no wonder that
an understanding of the true position hardly exists. It is an
Alice-in-Wonderland world where the more you inflate, the more GDP statistics
say the economy is growing. Under-recording the price deflator has become
central to maintaining the delusion. Almost no one realises that an increase in
nominal GDP is no more than a reflection of more money and credit being
injected into the economy. It confuses this increase in the quantity of money
and credit with progress. But progress suffers the disadvantage, like the
general price level, of being impossible to measure with statistics.
Reliance on statistical method has encouraged wrongheaded
government intervention.
Long ago, we dismissed the certain knowledge that society thrives by
cooperation and governments only by intervention. The former progresses, the
latter interferes. It prevented governments from trying to improve on free
markets, but that ended following the First World War. Consequently, decades of
intervention from the 1920s onwards have increasingly distorted our world away
from free-markets to embrace the Gospel of Government. The gospel has been a
drip-feed upon which modern economies have become increasingly dependent.
Stalling into a nose-dive
That drip-feed is now augmented by American trade
protectionism, reversing the expansion of trade from which we have all
benefited. The harmful effect on the American economy will become apparent.
The combination of a long period of credit expansion and trade tariffs will
very likely drive it into a deepening recession, possibly a slump, as these
conditions today repeat those of 1929-1932.
If the inflationary effect on prices is to be limited, it
will require foreign investors to buy dollars and increasing quantities of US
Treasury debt to cover an escalating budget deficit. Global funds will have to
be diverted to the dollar from other investment opportunities, notably the
widescale development of Asia. From its policy towards China’s economic
development, elements of the American deep state appear to understand this. President
Trump appears not to. And now, he proposes to weaken the dollar the foreigners
are expected to buy to finance his escalating budget deficits.
It is a difficult trap he has unwittingly set for his
administration. And as the US
economy stalls further, and the dollar weakens in a vain attempt by
policy-makers under The Donald’s cosh to make America great again, the dollar’s
slide will require rising interest rates for its purchasing power to be
stabilised, forcing US Treasury prices into a bear market. The US Treasury’s
finances will be plainly ensnared in a debt trap.
Other currencies, driven for decades by the same
Keynesian logic, are to greater and lesser extents in the same boat. But every
currency has two driving forces that determine their valuations. There is the
collective assessment of the foreign exchanges, and changes in preferences
between holding money and buying goods in the domestic economy. Sometimes, the
foreigners might feel a fall is overdone, and buy a currency when its domestic
purchasing power is still falling. At other times, the slide towards oblivion
is deferred by the general public who cannot get their heads round what is
happening to their government’s money. But despite these interacting forces,
once the world’s reserve currency begins to decline, interest rates everywhere
have to rise.
If this increasingly likely event happens, the effect on
forward-looking markets is certain to be brutal. Today’s stall becomes a
free-fall tomorrow. That is why it is likely that by the end of this year it
will be increasingly apparent that national economies, emasculated by continual
wealth-transfer through monetary debasement and over-burdened by non-productive
debt, will begin to rhyme with the crash of 1929-32 and the subsequent
depression. The most notable difference is that with today’s currencies being
unbacked fiat instead of tied to gold, prices will rise instead of falling as
they did in the 1930s.
Implications for gold
The last time the destructive forces of an
end-of-credit-cycle coincided with trade protectionism was in October 1929.
They were the driving factors behind the Wall Street crash and the subsequent
depression. This
time, the tariffs are not nearly as high as those of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff
Act, but the magnitude of the credit cycle is far greater. While we can hope
that this time the combination is not as disruptive as the 1929-32 episode,
there is no doubt that today there is enough of a build-up of market
distortions ready to wash out of the global economy to justify considerable
unease.
This unease is yet to be manifest in widespread
investment opinion, which still hopes for a miracle from monetary policies. But
both our analysis and the empirical observations of events ninety years ago
demonstrate why a miracle is impossible. A slump in global business activity is
already developing, and the only policy response will be inflationary. Monetary
expansion is effectively guaranteed in a vain attempt to stop a downturn and to
ensure the banking system is preserved. This compares with a 25% contraction in
broad money between 1929 and 1933 as thousands of American banks went under.
Through the medium of the dollar, in 1929-33 prices were
measured in gold, which was fixed at $20.67 to the ounce. This time, there is
no sheet anchor, and the dollar will simply lose purchasing power. This means there will be more dollars to the
ounce of gold. There is no point in speculating how many dollars there will be
to the ounce; you might as well debate how many angels can dance on the head of
a pin. More importantly, it is difficult to see how the slide in the dollar’s
purchasing power can be stopped once it starts.
Just as the ability of the productive sector to pay taxes
is being increasingly undermined at the same time as the government’s
expenditure rises, we can also see time preferences adding a further layer of
destruction to government finances. Foreigners in particular will need far
higher interest rates to stop them selling dollars and to persuade them to buy
again. This was the policy of Paul Volcker, as Chairman of the Fed addressed in
the early eighties, when he increased interest rates to 20%. Federal government
debt then stood at only 30% of GDP, while today it stands at 105%. Putting
aside the bad debts escalating at the banks from a grossly overindebted private
sector, a rise in interest rates sufficient to stabilise the fiat dollar would
almost certainly wipe out government finances and therefor faith in the dollar
itself.
That is the extent the debt trap has now reached, and the
problem is not confined to America. All major economies are in the same boat with very few
notable exceptions. The Eurozone includes governments with severe debt
problems, and the Japanese government has the highest debt to GDP ratio of them
all. Lesser currencies have always had difficulties, which will simply escalate
if dollar interest rates rise.
For the moment, very few see the true extent of the fiat
currency problem. It
is hard for them to visualise an economic slump when overall demand for goods
drops, and for their prices to rise at the same time. They are fixated on the
objective value of money in transactions, and do not realise that if people
lose faith in it, a currency’s purchasing power will slide.
When it starts, the process could be rapid. The education
of the masses in this matter, thanks to cryptocurrencies, is more advanced now
than it has ever been. If bitcoin soars to $20,000, $50,000 and more,
millennials round the world will understand that the dollar, or their local
currency, is going down. The rush out of fiat bank deposits into crypto on its
own could easily precipitate a widespread currency and systemic crisis.
This is not to advocate buying bitcoin, or gold for that
matter. It is just to warn of the approaching end of the road for unbacked fiat
currencies at a time when governments themselves face bankruptcy.
There is a well-known saying, that governments can’t go
bust. Don’t you believe it: it depends on fools continuing to place value in
their fiat currencies. We can begin to see that end in sight.
Friday, July 19, 2019
Should you know your Line score?
Two years ago, when the social credit
system was introduced in China, it was obvious that the idea was too good not
to spread outside the frontiers of the Middle Kingdom and so it has even faster
than anticipated.
As expected the idea to be more presentable
has been stripped of its most nefarious aspects of “social control” but the
basic concept is the same: To introduce a score which is easily exchangeable
between companies and gives a reliable mix of social and economic information
on people for marketing, commercial and financial purposes.
Outside the US where Credit Bureaus like Equifax
and Experian have build credit scores covering the credit worthiness of most of
the population, other countries have limited themselves in this field mostly
due to privacy concerns, especially in Europe and Japan.
But the need to segment efficiently and
target more readily the right people has not only been growing but becoming more and more
indispensable.
Who needs segmentation?
As we explained already in previous posts,
segmenting your own client database is complex and expensive and segmenting non
clients is close to impossible for most companies due to the lack of reliable
and relevant information. And still, it needs to be done if only because not
doing it exposes you to the risk of not offering the right incentive to the
right people when your better informed competitors skim out the best segments
of the population with tailored services. Whatever we may thing of targeting,
it is a arm race which no company can ignore and expect to stay in
business.
But to segment people, you need data, lot’s
of data which is obviously not available to most companies which have access to
little more than what’s on their client list: Names, addresses and a list of
transaction.
Enters the Internet platform companies with
their huge database and free services. These database being gigantic, the
probability to strike gold with the right tools is clear. On the other hand their
“free” but actually extremely expensive services raise the incentive to do “something”
with data. Facebook and Google, the two giants in the sector have focused
themselves on cornering the on-line advertising ecosystem, offering targeted advertising
to companies. The system works and is efficient, but you mostly do not know who
you are targeting beyond the specifications of the segments you are creating in
a black box system which is proactive but blind. This is the accepted practice
of the Internet which mostly protects the privacy of everyone while offering
better segmentation that what advertising agency could ever offer. The online advertising
market being huge and growing very fast, both Google and Facebook have little incentive
to go much beyond what they currently do with the risk of increasing still
further the negative attention they are attracting.
But other, smaller players, such as Line,
face a very different and less attractive ballgame. Line is a free service
offering unlimited communication (similar to WhatsApp) with a few commercial
applications but very little space available for advertising on its mostly
mobile platform. So the question to mine efficiently the huge pool of
communication they had access to was from the beginning hanging in the air and
waiting to be answered. Creating a credit score is the smart answer.
It is interesting in this respect to note
that people accept that on-line platforms such as Google, Facebook or Line can analyze
as much as they want their written communication but that voice companies such
as ATT or NTT are not allowed to do the same with voice contents. A difference
of content or perception?
What is the Line score?
First of all, let’s note that Line Score is
a product of Line Credit Corporation which itself is a joint venture between
Line, Mizuho Bank and Orico (Oriental Corporation). This underlines the
important financial aspect of this new service.
Secondly, the service is of course
voluntary and will be based on building relations with thousands of partner
companies which will offer access and incentives to people, powering the system
and helping build a critical mass of early adopters.
Unlike its Chinese counterpart, this
Japanese system is not a “social score” and certainly has no intentions of
becoming a political score. But here the problem is that once you have created
a basic score and it becomes freely available which is the goal, it becomes
extremely easy to tweak it to create a derivative which offers whatever
characteristics you want… And this clearly is the risk of such a system. Once
it exists, it is extremely easy to create whatever version you want.
Likewise, the system has not been gamified
as in China to make it more acceptable. . yet. This of course is only a matter of
time. If adoption is too slow, it is obvious that someone, somewhere will add
some addictive “game-like” aspects to it. Points, gifts, levels and other ideas
are all over the Internet to be chosen from, to make the system more addictive
and ubiquitous.
Finally, let’s not forget that this score
is before anything a financial score, so its primary goal will be to target
Consumer finance, a large and growing market in Japan.
So to resume: A great idea, a powerful market
need, available data and technology means that we all will get used to seeing
scores on our mobile phones sooner than later. It is likely, at least at the
beginning that these scores will proliferate. Then the market will settle and
select the best ones. Meanwhile, China will be 2 or 3 years ahead, fine tuning
and refining the technology (without controversy? I am not so sure but let’s
see.)
Eventually, I believe these scores will
soon become the core of a multitude of such indexes and synthetic numbers used
in an infinite variety of functions to allow, disallow, give access, privileges
in an infinity of fields; transportation, information, finance, leisure and
more. The transformation from data to information and into insight will be
completed and another level of complexity will arise.
Such technology is both to be feared and
welcome. It all depends what we do with it. It can both be a tool for increased
efficiency or enhanced coercion. In the end it is likely to be both as so many
other technologies which came before. What we measure and how we implement it will
be important to put it on the right tracks. A system by default as so often
happens with technology is not likely to give us the best possible outcome.
Unlike what Adam Smith believed, the invisible hand of the market has often
proved to favor vested interest and its actions to be neither light nor
optimum.
For reference, I include below the
information provided by Line to present the product in its press report.
[Japan] LINE Launches Proprietary Scoring
Service LINE Score to “Enrich Daily Life”
2019.06.27 ALL
● Users can
enjoy car and fashion-related benefits, with travel, food, and home décor
benefits to follow
● Users consent
will always be required before calculating scores or sharing data with partner
companies
TOKYO – June 27,
2019 – LINE Corporation (“LINE”) announces that its proprietary scoring
service LINE Score will be available today through LINE Credit Corporation
(“LINE Credit”).*1 LINE Credit itself is a group company of LINE Financial
Corporation (“LINE Financial”), provider of LINE’s financial services.
*1 LINE Credit
is a joint venture established between LINE Financial, Mizuho Bank Ltd.
(“Mizuho”) and Orient Corporation (“Orico”).
Utilizing a
proprietary AI-driven scoring model, LINE Score is available to the LINE app’s
more than 80 million MAU in Japan, and is easily accessed via the in-app LINE
Wallet tab. The service will provide promotions, deals, and a range of other
benefits customized to each individual user’s score.
Specifically,
calculating the overall score involves utilizing data from a user’s activity
trends on the LINE platform (such as usage of the LINE app and other LINE
Family services) along with additional information from the preliminary
questionnaire, and a combination of AI capabilities and Mizuho and Orico’s
sophisticated know-how. With the launch of LINE Score, LINE has been able to
establish a proprietary scoring platform suited to online financial services.
Additionally, a
user’s score will only be calculated after they have given their consent.
Background to
LINE Score and plans for the future
With the
widespread use of the internet and smartphones, various activities in people’s
day-to-day lives are rapidly shifting to the online world. The age of
full-scale big data has arrived. Countless businesses are analyzing and
utilizing online data to further optimize their services to suit individual
interests and preferences, evolving them into better, more useful offerings.
Novel and innovative mechanisms and systems also continue to emerge.
In addition to
the LINE messaging service, LINE offers its over 80 million MAU in Japan a wide
range of content, services, and businesses in areas such as AI, O2O, and
Fintech. Providing these services has enabled LINE to accumulate a vast amount
of big data on a daily basis, leading to its growth as one of the largest big
data companies in Japan.
With LINE Score,
the proprietary scoring method works by combining big data collected from the
LINE platform, and a dozen items of profile information provided by the user in
the preliminary questionnaire. Based on this score, users can enjoy more
personalized and convenient benefits and experiences, as well as obtain more
value from LINE services and its various partners to “enrich their daily
life.”
LINE’s huge
userbase has made it possible for the company to deliver a more accurately
calculated, more tailor-made experience. To offer benefits to even more users
in the future, LINE intends to increase the number of partnerships with other
companies and services, and expand the value and value-added experiences it
offers.
In future, LINE
is contemplating applying scoring data to other LINE services to provide an
even more convenient and useful system for users. Further, the company is also
considering providing scoring data to third parties through API for agreed upon
uses, while always respecting user consent and strictly safeguarding personal
information.
Going forward,
LINE will continue to develop LINE Score into an exceptionally convenient
service—striving to securely use and manage data, and provide experiences that
will make users’ day-to-day life just a little richer.
Features of LINE
Score
1. AI-driven
proprietary scoring model
LINE’s
proprietary scoring model utilizes (i) data on a user’s activity trends on LINE
services and (ii) the additional information provided in the preliminary
questionnaire to produce a score between 100 and 1,000 points. Users can check
their own scores at any time.
2. User consent
is always required
Users will be
asked to provide their consent before using the LINE Score service. Scoring
data and information provided by the user when first using the service will be
utilized to calculate scores in future, and for the purposes outlined in LINE
Credit’s privacy policy. This data will never be shared with LINE’s partner
companies (providers of benefits) without user consent. LINE places protection
of user privacy as its highest management priority, and follows a much broader
interpretation of personal information than the legal definition. As the
company is also especially stringent when it comes to protecting “privacy of
communications” (such as messages), the content of communications and messages
are not included among data used to calculate scores.
3. Benefits
based on scores
Special deals,
promotions, and a host of other benefits are available to users, with each set
of benefits tailored to the individual user’s score. For example, various campaigns
held during different periods will offer special deals for sharing and
subscription services, including space sharing (such as parking spots and
venues), items (such as clothes and accessories), transport (such as cars and
bicycles), and skill sharing (such as housekeeping services).
This summer in
Japan, LINE also plans to add to lineup of benefits with a new unsecured
personal loan service, LINE Pocket Money. Under the new service, annual
interest rates and credit limits most suitable for an individual user will be
determined by their score from the LINE Score service. In the lead-up to the
launch, LINE intends to develop a service model that is a go-to option for
unplanned expenses, and make it possible to complete the entire process—application,
borrowing, and lastly, repayments—on the LINE app. More details will be
announced when LINE Pocket Money is released.
About LINE
Score
LINE Score is a
service that allows users to enjoy special deals, receive gifts, and other
benefits that are tailored to their scores. Getting started with the service is
straightforward—users simply open the LINE app, go to the LINE Wallet tab, tap
on LINE Score and agree to the Terms and Conditions. Scores will increase if
the user answers around a dozen preliminary questions, and will also regularly
update as more data is acquired on the user’s activity trends within the LINE
services.
Calculating
scores with the service
Users must
consent to the LINE Score Terms and Conditions before they begin using the
service. Data will not be calculated by default, or be utilized under a user’s
current LINE account settings. Additionally, each time a user makes use of a
benefit offered by a partner company, they will need to consent to having their
data shared with the company in question.
Partnering with
a diverse range of companies to offer user benefits
To celebrate the
launch of LINE Score, users who use the service and obtain a score will be able
to participate in the following campaigns.
• Campaign
launches today: Invitation to the August 23 premiere screening in Japan of the
upcoming anime film, Ni no Kuni distributed by Warner Bros (all users are
eligible regardless of their score).
• Campaign
launches in July: Rent Italian luxury cars for free
• Campaign launches
in July: Rent designer French bags for free
• Campaign
launches in August: Rent Swiss luxury wristwatches for free
More details on
the campaigns and promotional periods can be found in the following blog
post.
Starting today,
the following companies will offer an array of special deals, promotions, and
other benefits to users via LINE Score.
From today to
July
• DeNA SOMPO
Mobility Co. Ltd.: JPY 5,000 coupon for new users (from today)
• Laxus
Technologies Inc.: JPY 3,000 worth of Laxus Points (from today)
• LINE Pay
Corporation: Level up in My Level incentive program for users with a score over
a certain number (from today)
• Airbnb: JPY
2,000 coupon (from July)
Coming soon
• Oisix Ra
Daichi Inc.: 60% discount for Oisix package of assorted foods
• Orient
Corporation: Benefits for new Orico members and additional 1,000 Orico
Points
• Clover Lab.
Inc: 20% off first month (up to JPY 3,960)
• Komehyo Co.
Ltd.: Users can enjoy a JPY 1,000 discount when making a purchase worth JPY
5,000 or more, and receive an additional JPY 1,000 when selling item(s)
totaling JPY 5,000 or more.
• Stripe
International Inc.: New members can rent one additional item for free for first
month
• Subsclife
Inc.: JPY 5,000 coupon for the first month fee
• DMM.com LLC:
JPY 1,000 for DMM’s Iroiro Rental service
• LIFULL Co.
Ltd: LIFULL Interior coupon worth JPY 2,000
LINE is
currently recruiting new companies interested in partnering to provide benefits
for LINE Score users. More information can be found at the LINE Partners page
below.
*Company names
are listed in Japanese phonetic order.
*The campaigns
listed above may change.
About LINE
Corporation
Company name:
LINE Corporation
Head office: JR
Shinjuku Miraina Tower 23F, 4-1-6 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo
Representative:
Takeshi Idezawa, Representative Director
Business:
Provision and operation of the LINE messaging app and content and services
provided on the LINE platform, other web service businesses and AI businesses
Capital: JPY
96.199 billion (as of March 30, 2019)
Established:
September 4, 2000 (trade name changed from NHN Japan Corporation on April 1,
2013)
About LINE
Credit Corporation (as of June 2019)
Company name:
LINE Credit Corporation
Head office:
Osaki Garden Tower 22F, 1-1-1 Nishi-Shinagawa, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo
Representative:
Mikihiko Yoshinaga, Representative Director
Business:
Provision and operation of scoring services, and development of loan services
Capital and
capital reserve: JPY 5 billion
Shareholding
ratio: LINE Financial Corporation: 51%, Mizuho Bank Ltd.: 34%, Orient
Corporation: 15%
Established: May
1, 2018
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