• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.109-128
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• 2010

The purpose of our research is to figure out the 'non-financial value' of consumers applying networks amongst consumer groups, the data-based marketing strategy to the analysis and delve into the ways for enhancing effectives in marketing activities by adapting the value to the marketing. To verify the authenticity of the points, we did the empirical test on the consumer group using 'the Essence Cosmetics Products' of high involvement that is deeply affected by consumer perceptions and the word-of-mouth activities. 1) The empirical analysis reveals the following features. First, the segmented market for 'Essence Consumer' is composed of several independent networks, each network shows to have the consumers that is high degree centrality and closeness centrality. Second, the result proves the authenticity of the non-financial value for boosting corporate profits by the high degree centrality and closeness centrality consumer's word-of-mouth activities. Lastly, we verify that there lies a difference in the network structure of 'Essence Cosmetics Market'per each product origin(domestic, foreign) and demographic characteristics. It does, therefore, indicate the need to consider the features applying mutually complementary for the network targeting.

• Journal of Practical Agriculture & Fisheries Research
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.137-150
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• 2010

Traditionally, like many people in mountain region of the Himalaya, the Lwang communities depend on mix of subsistence agriculture, animal husbandry, and seasonal migrant labor for their livelihoods. These traditional systems are characterized by low productivity, diverse use of available natural resources (largely for home consumption), limited markets, and some aversion for innovation. The potential to generate wealth through commerce has largely been untapped by these mountain residents and thus is undervalued in local and national economies. Introduction of organic tea farming is a part of Lwang community's several initiatives to break the vicious poverty cycle Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP) played facilitating roles in all their efforts since beginning. In five years, the tea plantation emerged as a new means for secured a livelihood. This study aims to analyze the current practices in tea farming both in terms of farm management and soil nutrient status(technical) and the prosperity of the tea farmers (social). The technical aspect covers the soil and tea leaf analysis of various nutrients contents in the soil and tea leaf. Originally, the technical aspect of the study was not planned but later during the consultation with the advisor it was taken into consideration which added value to the research study. The sample were collected from different locations and analyzed on the field itself. The other part of the study i.e. the social aspect was done through questionnaire survey and focus group discussion. the tea farming provided them not only a new opportunity but also earned an identity in the region. This initiative was undertaken as a piloting measure. Now that the tea is in production with processing unit established locally, more serious consideration has to be given for better yield and economic prosperity. This research finding will help the community to analyze their efforts and make correction measures in tea garden management and application of fertilizer. It is also expected to fill up the gaps of knowledge and information required to reduce economic stresses and enhance capacity of farmers to make the tea farming a sustainable and beneficial business. The findings are expected to Sustainability of organic tea farming has direct impacts on biodiversity conservation compared to the other traditional farming practices that are more resource intensive. The study will also contribute to identify key action points required for reducing poverty while conserving environment and enhancing livelihoods

• Information Systems Review
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.125-146
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• 2020

With the penetration of the Internet and e-commerce, a 'crowdfunding' has emerged as a new way of financing. Crowdfunding has the advantage for a person to able to a simple way to finance her/his an innovative product or service from crowd. However, the success rate for crowdfunding projects is less than half. In this study, we introduce social exchange theory to explore the impact of trust and perceived psychological risk on the intention to participate in a crowdfunding website. Different from previous studies that have focused on a crowdfunding creator, we consider two different perspectives of a project creator and a project supporter. In addition, we compare perceptions of crowdfunding in different cultural contexts by conducting survey in two different countries Korea and Austria. Result shows that trust in recommendation and trust in website have different impacts on the intention to participate from two different perspectives. It also shows that perception of the quality and transparency of information provided by crowdfunding website has greater impact on trust in Korea than that in Austria. In case of perception of psychological risk, it has a negative impact on Austria's intention to create or support a project. On the other hand, it has relatively small impact on the intention to support and does not affect the intention to create a project in Korea.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.111-126
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• 2017

Recommender systems based on association rule mining significantly contribute to seller's sales by reducing consumers' time to search for products that they want. Recommendations based on the frequency of transactions such as orders can effectively screen out the products that are statistically marketable among multiple products. A product with a high possibility of sales, however, can be omitted from the recommendation if it records insufficient number of transactions at the beginning of the sale. Products missing from the associated recommendations may lose the chance of exposure to consumers, which leads to a decline in the number of transactions. In turn, diminished transactions may create a vicious circle of lost opportunity to be recommended. Thus, initial sales are likely to remain stagnant for a certain period of time. Products that are susceptible to fashion or seasonality, such as clothing, may be greatly affected. This study was aimed at expanding association rules to include into the list of recommendations those products whose initial trading frequency of transactions is low despite the possibility of high sales. The particular purpose is to predict the strength of the direct connection of two unconnected items through the properties of the paths located between them. An association between two items revealed in transactions can be interpreted as the interaction between them, which can be expressed as a link in a social network whose nodes are items. The first step calculates the centralities of the nodes in the middle of the paths that indirectly connect the two nodes without direct connection. The next step identifies the number of the paths and the shortest among them. These extracts are used as independent variables in the regression analysis to predict future connection strength between the nodes. The strength of the connection between the two nodes of the model, which is defined by the number of nodes between the two nodes, is measured after a certain period of time. The regression analysis results confirm that the number of paths between the two products, the distance of the shortest path, and the number of neighboring items connected to the products are significantly related to their potential strength. This study used actual order transaction data collected for three months from February to April in 2016 from an online commerce company. To reduce the complexity of analytics as the scale of the network grows, the analysis was performed only on miscellaneous goods. Two consecutively purchased items were chosen from each customer's transactions to obtain a pair of antecedent and consequent, which secures a link needed for constituting a social network. The direction of the link was determined in the order in which the goods were purchased. Except for the last ten days of the data collection period, the social network of associated items was built for the extraction of independent variables. The model predicts the number of links to be connected in the next ten days from the explanatory variables. Of the 5,711 previously unconnected links, 611 were newly connected for the last ten days. Through experiments, the proposed model demonstrated excellent predictions. Of the 571 links that the proposed model predicts, 269 were confirmed to have been connected. This is 4.4 times more than the average of 61, which can be found without any prediction model. This study is expected to be useful regarding industries whose new products launch quickly with short life cycles, since their exposure time is critical. Also, it can be used to detect diseases that are rarely found in the early stages of medical treatment because of the low incidence of outbreaks. Since the complexity of the social networking analysis is sensitive to the number of nodes and links that make up the network, this study was conducted in a particular category of miscellaneous goods. Future research should consider that this condition may limit the opportunity to detect unexpected associations between products belonging to different categories of classification.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.107-120
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• 2014

This study proposes a novel recommender system using the structural hole analysis to reflect qualitative and emotional information in recommendation process. Although collaborative filtering (CF) is known as the most popular recommendation algorithm, it has some limitations including scalability and sparsity problems. The scalability problem arises when the volume of users and items become quite large. It means that CF cannot scale up due to large computation time for finding neighbors from the user-item matrix as the number of users and items increases in real-world e-commerce sites. Sparsity is a common problem of most recommender systems due to the fact that users generally evaluate only a small portion of the whole items. In addition, the cold-start problem is the special case of the sparsity problem when users or items newly added to the system with no ratings at all. When the user's preference evaluation data is sparse, two users or items are unlikely to have common ratings, and finally, CF will predict ratings using a very limited number of similar users. Moreover, it may produces biased recommendations because similarity weights may be estimated using only a small portion of rating data. In this study, we suggest a novel limitation of the conventional CF. The limitation is that CF does not consider qualitative and emotional information about users in the recommendation process because it only utilizes user's preference scores of the user-item matrix. To address this novel limitation, this study proposes cluster-indexing CF model with the structural hole analysis for recommendations. In general, the structural hole means a location which connects two separate actors without any redundant connections in the network. The actor who occupies the structural hole can easily access to non-redundant, various and fresh information. Therefore, the actor who occupies the structural hole may be a important person in the focal network and he or she may be the representative person in the focal subgroup in the network. Thus, his or her characteristics may represent the general characteristics of the users in the focal subgroup. In this sense, we can distinguish friends and strangers of the focal user utilizing the structural hole analysis. This study uses the structural hole analysis to select structural holes in subgroups as an initial seeds for a cluster analysis. First, we gather data about users' preference ratings for items and their social network information. For gathering research data, we develop a data collection system. Then, we perform structural hole analysis and find structural holes of social network. Next, we use these structural holes as cluster centroids for the clustering algorithm. Finally, this study makes recommendations using CF within user's cluster, and compare the recommendation performances of comparative models. For implementing experiments of the proposed model, we composite the experimental results from two experiments. The first experiment is the structural hole analysis. For the first one, this study employs a software package for the analysis of social network data - UCINET version 6. The second one is for performing modified clustering, and CF using the result of the cluster analysis. We develop an experimental system using VBA (Visual Basic for Application) of Microsoft Excel 2007 for the second one. This study designs to analyzing clustering based on a novel similarity measure - Pearson correlation between user preference rating vectors for the modified clustering experiment. In addition, this study uses 'all-but-one' approach for the CF experiment. In order to validate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we apply three comparative types of CF models to the same dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the other comparative models. In especial, the proposed model significantly performs better than two comparative modes with the cluster analysis from the statistical significance test. However, the difference between the proposed model and the naive model does not have statistical significance.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.19-42
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• 2012

Consumer consumption patterns are shifting rapidly as buyers migrate from offline markets to e-commerce routes, such as shopping channels on TV and internet shopping malls. In the offline markets consumers go shopping, see the shopping items, and choose from them. Recently consumers tend towards buying at shopping sites free from time and place. However, as e-commerce markets continue to expand, customers are complaining that it is becoming a bigger hassle to shop online. In the online shopping, shoppers have very limited information on the products. The delivered products can be different from what they have wanted. This case results to purchase cancellation. Because these things happen frequently, they are likely to refer to the consumer reviews and companies should be concerned about consumer's voice. E-commerce is a very important marketing tool for suppliers. It can recommend products to customers and connect them directly with suppliers with just a click of a button. The recommender system is being studied in various ways. Some of the more prominent ones include recommendation based on best-seller and demographics, contents filtering, and collaborative filtering. However, these systems all share two weaknesses : they cannot recommend products to consumers on a personal level, and they cannot recommend products to new consumers with no buying history. To fix these problems, we can use the information which has been collected from the questionnaires about their demographics and preference ratings. But, consumers feel these questionnaires are a burden and are unlikely to provide correct information. This study investigates combining collaborative filtering with the centrality of social network analysis. This centrality measure provides the information to infer the preference of new consumers from the shopping history of existing and previous ones. While the past researches had focused on the existing consumers with similar shopping patterns, this study tried to improve the accuracy of recommendation with all shopping information, which included not only similar shopping patterns but also dissimilar ones. Data used in this study, Movie Lens' data, was made by Group Lens research Project Team at University of Minnesota to recommend movies with a collaborative filtering technique. This data was built from the questionnaires of 943 respondents which gave the information on the preference ratings on 1,684 movies. Total data of 100,000 was organized by time, with initial data of 50,000 being existing customers and the latter 50,000 being new customers. The proposed recommender system consists of three systems : [+] group recommender system, [-] group recommender system, and integrated recommender system. [+] group recommender system looks at customers with similar buying patterns as 'neighbors', whereas [-] group recommender system looks at customers with opposite buying patterns as 'contraries'. Integrated recommender system uses both of the aforementioned recommender systems to recommend movies that both recommender systems pick. The study of three systems allows us to find the most suitable recommender system that will optimize accuracy and customer satisfaction. Our analysis showed that integrated recommender system is the best solution among the three systems studied, followed by [-] group recommended system and [+] group recommender system. This result conforms to the intuition that the accuracy of recommendation can be improved using all the relevant information. We provided contour maps and graphs to easily compare the accuracy of each recommender system. Although we saw improvement on accuracy with the integrated recommender system, we must remember that this research is based on static data with no live customers. In other words, consumers did not see the movies actually recommended from the system. Also, this recommendation system may not work well with products other than movies. Thus, it is important to note that recommendation systems need particular calibration for specific product/customer types.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.113-127
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• 2016

Among the techniques for recommendation, collaborative filtering (CF) is commonly recognized to be the most effective for implementing recommender systems. Until now, CF has been popularly studied and adopted in both academic and real-world applications. The basic idea of CF is to create recommendation results by finding correlations between users of a recommendation system. CF system compares users based on how similar they are, and recommend products to users by using other like-minded people's results of evaluation for each product. Thus, it is very important to compute evaluation similarities among users in CF because the recommendation quality depends on it. Typical CF uses user's explicit numeric ratings of items (i.e. quantitative information) when computing the similarities among users in CF. In other words, user's numeric ratings have been a sole source of user preference information in traditional CF. However, user ratings are unable to fully reflect user's actual preferences from time to time. According to several studies, users may more actively accommodate recommendation of reliable others when purchasing goods. Thus, trust relationship can be regarded as the informative source for identifying user's preference with accuracy. Under this background, we propose a new hybrid recommender system that fuses CF and social network analysis (SNA). The proposed system adopts the recommendation algorithm that additionally reflect the result analyzed by SNA. In detail, our proposed system is based on conventional memory-based CF, but it is designed to use both user's numeric ratings and trust relationship information between users when calculating user similarities. For this, our system creates and uses not only user-item rating matrix, but also user-to-user trust network. As the methods for calculating user similarity between users, we proposed two alternatives - one is algorithm calculating the degree of similarity between users by utilizing in-degree and out-degree centrality, which are the indices representing the central location in the social network. We named these approaches as 'Trust CF - All' and 'Trust CF - Conditional'. The other alternative is the algorithm reflecting a neighbor's score higher when a target user trusts the neighbor directly or indirectly. The direct or indirect trust relationship can be identified by searching trust network of users. In this study, we call this approach 'Trust CF - Search'. To validate the applicability of the proposed system, we used experimental data provided by LibRec that crawled from the entire FilmTrust website. It consists of ratings of movies and trust relationship network indicating who to trust between users. The experimental system was implemented using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and UCINET 6. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system, we compared the performance of our proposed method with one of conventional CF system. The performances of recommender system were evaluated by using average MAE (mean absolute error). The analysis results confirmed that in case of applying without conditions the in-degree centrality index of trusted network of users(i.e. Trust CF - All), the accuracy (MAE = 0.565134) was lower than conventional CF (MAE = 0.564966). And, in case of applying the in-degree centrality index only to the users with the out-degree centrality above a certain threshold value(i.e. Trust CF - Conditional), the proposed system improved the accuracy a little (MAE = 0.564909) compared to traditional CF. However, the algorithm searching based on the trusted network of users (i.e. Trust CF - Search) was found to show the best performance (MAE = 0.564846). And the result from paired samples t-test presented that Trust CF - Search outperformed conventional CF with 10% statistical significance level. Our study sheds a light on the application of user's trust relationship network information for facilitating electronic commerce by recommending proper items to users.

• Journal of Agricultural Extension & Community Development
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.967-1006
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• 2014

This study attempted to provide policy recommendations in promoting new cooperatives established in agriculture based on the 2012 Cooperative Act. A questionnaire survey was conducted with 195 newly established cooperatives as the policy target of this study. The new cooperatives were classified as three kinds namely as 'Business' Cooperatives', 'Consumers' Cooperatives', 'Social Cooperatives' based on their member attributes and objectives. Interesting to note that, all of these new cooperatives born by the new Act has taken the marketing business as their main stream business. Among the three types, 'Business Cooperatives' are ranked the highest amount of capital shares per person in average, having about 30 members in size. In categorization, 'Business Cooperatives' include farmer cooperatives as majority and employee cooperatives. They are usually involved in both production and marketing and even in processing activities, and have tried to secure their business performance by e-commerce and stable business contracts. Their diverse activities are highly associated with their local community. Consumers' Cooperatives include consumer cooperatives and stakeholder cooperatives in achieving welfare of members. This type has lower share in capital but has over 30 members in a cooperative, taking marketing (distribution) business as main and often take advantage of their social network and physical store. Regional relationships are less than producer cooperatives. 'Social Cooperatives' are established by public interest and have around 10 members and lowest per capital. their business and community activity is similar to the consumer cooperatives. This study recommends the needs of designing suitable business models by these three types of cooperatives in the future, while appropriating their membership size for their tangible business operations. The government policy direction should aim to develop their new business opportunities and its management stabilization, especially in conjunction with the existing agricultural cooperatives (Nonghyup). It must be rather than to provide simply policy supports for establishment. An in-depth study is recommended in this regard.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.75-99
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• 2012

Innovation can come from inside or outside organizations. Recently, organizations have begun turning to external knowledge more often, through various forms of collective intelligence (CI) as collaborative platform to solve complex problems. Several factors facilitate this CI utilization phenomenon. First, with the rapid development of Internet and social media, numerous web applications have become available to millions of the Internet users over the past few decades. Web 2.0 and social media have become innovative web applications that provide an environment for human social interaction and collaboration. Second, the diffusion of simple and easy-to-use technologies that enable users to interact and design web applications without programming skills have led to vast, previously unknown amounts of user-generated content. Finally, the Internet has enabled communities to connect and collaborate, creating a virtual world of CI. In this study, web enabled CI is defined as a composed ability of individuals who are acting as a single cognitive unit to achieve common goals, think reasonably, solve problems, make decisions, carry out complex tasks, and develop creative ideas collectively through participation and collaboration on the web. Although CI plays a critical role in organizational innovation and collaboration, the dubious quality of CI is still problem that is difficult to solve. In general, the quality level of content collected from the crowd is lower than that from professionals. Thus, it is important to identify determinants of CI quality and to analyze the relationship between CI quality and its usefulness. However, there is a lack of empirical study on the quality factors of web-enabled CI. There exist a variety of web enabled CI sites such as Threadless, iStockphoto or InnoCentive, Wikipedia, and Youtube. One of the most successful forms of web-enabled CI is the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, accessible all over the world. Another one example is Naver KnowledgeiN, a typical and popular CI site offering question and answer (Q&A) services. It is necessary to study whether or not different types of CI have a different effect on CI quality and its usefulness. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to answer to following research questions: ${\bullet}$ What determinants are important to CI quality? ${\bullet}$ What is the relationship between CI quality factors and the usefulness of web-enabled CI? ${\bullet}$ Does CI type have a moderating effect on the relationship between CI quality, its determinants, and CI usefulness? Online survey using Google Docs with email and Kakao Talk was conducted for collecting data from Wikipedia and Naver KnowledgeiN users. A totoal of 490 valid responses were collected, where users of Wikipedia were 220 while users of Naver KnowledgeiN were 270. Expertise of contributors, community size, and diversity of contributors were identified as core determinants of perceived CI quality. Perceived CI quality has significantly influenced perceived CI usefulness from a user's perspective. For improving CI quality, it is believed that organizations should ensure proper crowd size, facilitate CI contributors' diversity and attract as many expert contributors as possible. Hypotheses that CI type plays a role of moderator were partially supported. First, the relationship between expertise of contributors and perceived CI quality was different according to CI type. The expertise of contributors played a more important role in CI quality in the case of Q&A services such as Knowledge iN compared to wiki services such as Wikipedia. This implies that Q&A service requires more expertise and experiences in particular areas rather than the case of Wiki service to improve service quality. Second, the relationship between community size and perceived CI quality was different according to CI type. The community size has a greater effect on CI quality in case of Wiki service than that of Q&A service. The number of contributors in Wikipeda is important because Wiki is an encyclopedia service which is edited and revised repeatedly from many contributors while the answer given in Naver Knowledge iN can not be corrected by others. Finally, CI quality has a greater effect on its usefulness in case of Wiki service rather than Q&A service. In this paper, we suggested implications for practitioners and theorists. Organizations offering services based on collective intelligence try to improve expertise of contributeros, to increase the number of contributors, and to facilitate participation of various contributors.

• Journal of Internet of Things and Convergence
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.1-10
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• 2022

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the characteristics of mobile-based financial platforms have an impact on the intention to use loan service users. In addition, it was attempted to investigate whether usefulness and ease of use had a mediating effect in the relationship between each characteristic of the mobile financial platform on the intention to use the loan service. Data collection was conducted from March 1 to April 30, 2022, and 200 people participated in the study. Analysis methods were frequency analysis, exploratory factor analysis, reliability analysis, correlation analysis, hierarchical multiple regression analysis, and three-step mediation regression analysis. The research results are as follows. First, the influence of user factors, technical factors, and environmental factors of a financial platform on the intention to use a mobile loan service was found to be ubiquity in user factors, reliability in technical factors, and facilitation conditions in environmental factors. Second, in the relationship between convenience and intention to use user factors, usefulness had a completely mediating effect. Third, in the relationship between reliability of technical factors and intention to use, usefulness showed a partial mediating effect. Fourth, in the relationship between the social impact of environmental factors and facilitation conditions and intention to use, the usefulness showed a partial mediating effect. Fifth, ease of use showed a completely mediating effect in the relationship between convenience and intention of use of user factors. Sixth, in the relationship between reliability of technical factors and intention to use, ease of use showed a partial mediating effect. Seventh, in the relationship between the social impact of environmental factors and intention to use, ease of use showed a partial mediating effect, and in the relationship between facilitation conditions and intention to use, ease of use showed a fully mediating effect. Through this study, we tried to present basic data on the determinants of the user's acceptable intention to use the mobile loan service.