Meritz Securities unveiled its next-generation financial platform MOUM, linking everything from investment information searches and artificial intelligence (AI) analysis to communication among domestic and overseas investors and stock orders. The company aims to extend its financial expertise to services for retail investors and expand its existing mobile trading system (MTS), focused on transaction convenience, into an investment ecosystem.

Meritz Securities held a MOUM launch event on Sept. 1 at Fairmont Ambassador Seoul in Yeouido, Seoul, and officially released the platform after about 18 months of development. The name reflects the idea of gathering scattered investment experiences into one place.

MOUM focuses on handling the entire process on one platform, from spotting market moves and checking related information and other investors' reactions to placing an order.

Rather than adding AI features to an existing MTS, the company said it connected AI, data, community and trading functions into a single flow from the start.

Jang-wook Lee (이장욱), head of Meritz Securities' Innoviz Division and an executive director, said, "It was designed not as an MTS with simple trading functions but as a platform users can use freely." He said the company will continue to secure good content and objective data and connect them within the platform through partnerships with external businesses.

MOUM's main information services can be used without a separate login. Users can join the community as associate members with a social login, and if they link Meritz Securities' online-only comprehensive investment account Super365, they convert to full members and can trade domestic and overseas stocks and use AI analysis for their holdings.

The finance-focused AI selects and summarizes key points from company results, news, disclosures and reports. Users can ask the AI additional questions, such as a company's growth trend or the background to recent share price moves, from the screen they are viewing. It also provides key changes in watchlists, holdings and recently viewed stocks based on account and usage data.

The search function shows related stocks and themes, news and community reactions when users enter products, brands or everyday keywords, even if they do not know the exact stock name. On market screens, it detects and alerts notable changes in real time, such as stocks beating earnings forecasts, new 52-week highs and lows, and surges in trading volume. It also provides video and audio briefings that summarize major issues.

MOUM also includes an exchange-traded fund (ETF) comparison function. For domestic ETFs, users can compare key indicators such as market capitalisation, returns, management fees and trading volume for similar products on the same screen. For overseas ETFs, it allows users to view returns, key indicators and constituent holdings for 3 selected products side by side.

Once users have made an investment decision, they can place an order directly from the screen where they were viewing news or charts without finding a separate order screen. The order screen is divided into an "Easy Mode" with only essential functions and a "Pro Mode" that provides charts, quotes and order information on one screen. On the portfolio screen linked to an account, users can check not only their holdings but also subsequent moves in stocks they have already sold.

A global investor community was presented as MOUM's core differentiator. Meritz Securities linked its in-house stock community with communities from U.S. social investing platform Stocktwits and global online securities platform Webull.

Users can check real-time opinions and reactions by U.S.-based investors for each stock, and posts are automatically translated to reflect local slang and the context of expressions.

Meritz Securities also applied Webull's finance-focused AI engine Vega AI to the platform. It plans to further develop it into agentic AI that understands users' investment goals and context and independently searches for and analyses needed information.

The company also cited as an ongoing task the need to manage the possibility that AI could omit or distort important information when summarising investment information. Lee said, "We reflected an information pre- and post-processing system aligned with financial regulations," and added it will continue to improve accuracy based on objective information and data.

At the platform layer, it applied a hybrid cloud structure built with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Core information such as accounts and funds is processed at its own data centre, while user-facing services are placed in the cloud so resources can be scaled up or down depending on demand.

It also separated authentication, quotes, orders, community and content services, reducing the risk that disruptions in some services spread to orders or quotes.

According to Meritz Securities, MOUM handles quotes for about 20,000 stocks in the South Korean and U.S. markets and processes more than 30,000 data items per second. It also conducted load testing assuming about 50,000 concurrent users. Quote data was designed to be delivered to users' WebSocket sessions within 5 milliseconds.

Meritz Securities plans to expand MOUM to global markets. It will pursue localisation work reflecting financial regulations, content and investor community characteristics in each target country, and it plans to add financial products and related data and content in stages.

Meritz Securities CEO Won-jae Jang (장원재) said, "The launch of MOUM does not simply add one more new mobile app." He said, "We will create an investment ecosystem where investors share their ideas and strategies, share each other's wisdom and grow together."