As individual incomes have risen, the continuous expansion of personal purchasing power through consumer credit has led to rapid growth in the consumer finance market. Individual customers are now gradually shifting from their previous role as mere sources of fund procurement to an increasingly important role as destinations for fund deployment. Consequently, competition among banks to increase market share in the consumer finance segment within the retail financial market has become increasingly fierce. However, the IMF crisis that struck at the end of 1997 radically transformed this paradigm, and it became evident that insolvency—whether in corporate finance or consumer finance—could directly threaten a bank's survival. In particular, credit risk has been rising day by day under the current circumstances where awareness of credit is insufficient and credit evaluation systems to support it are not fully established. Banks now face the challenge of how to stimulate loan marketing while reducing credit risk in order to increase profitability. The purpose of this study is to conceptualize credit risk as a function of two constructs—willingness to repay debt and ability to repay debt—and to analyze how effectively a credit risk model based on credit characteristics can be used in financial marketing. Data were collected from customers of 14 bank branches, with seven branches randomly selected from each of the Gangnam and Gangbuk areas of Seoul. A total of 532 valid questionnaires were used in the analysis. The results indicate that willingness to repay debt based on credit characteristics can predict credit risk far more effectively than ability to repay debt based on credit capacity.