KB Financial Group is set to be the first South Korean financial company to establish an IT R&D center, which will develop innovative ICTs (Information Communication Technology) such as Cloud, Big Data, and blockchain and apply them to financial services. This will be the first time where a financial business is going go to be responsible for its own IT research.
According to IT and financial industries, KB Financial Group (Chairman Yoon Jong-kyu) established South Korean financial industry’s first ‘IT Technical Innovation Center’.
Corresponding group is directly under KB Financial Group’s control and it is composed of groups centered on 5 major technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence), blockchain, Cloud, Big Data, and ecosystem and it looks for innovative tasks that can increase KB Financial Group’s competitive edge in IT. It will also promote IT personnel to support KB Financial Group’s digital strategies.
Department Head Cho Jin-seok of Information Protection Department, who is an expert in information security, will be dominated as the director of IT Technical Innovation Center. KB Financial Group placed about 20 IT experts in its subsidiaries.
KB Financial Group is going to operate a group comprehensive research lab that has IT personnel from bank, stock, indemnity insurance, and data system industries participating. IT Technical Innovation Center will be divided into New Technology Promotion Team and New Technology Verification Team. New Technology Promotion Team will look for new technologies and business examples and notify relevant trends to KB Financial Group and its subsidiaries. New Technology Verification Team will verify technologies through KB Financial Group’s group comprehensive research lab and commercialize them. IT Technical Innovation Center will add a third group next year that pushes for pilot projects involving new IT technologies.
Subsidiaries of KB Financial Group will look for ITs that are necessary for them and have their IT personnel participate in IT Technical Innovation Center.
“Although some financial companies have been operating testbeds, they are only for paperwork rather than verification of actual businesses.” said Director Cho Jin-seok of IT Technical Innovation Center. “IT Technical Innovation Center is going to be equipped with infrastructures so that outside Cloud environments such as Amazon and Oracle can be used.” He is indicating that IT Technical Innovation Center has groundwork where bank employees can actually develop ITs and lead in commercialization of businesses.
IT Technical Innovation Center will carry out ‘SEA (Sensing, Experiment, Action)’ strategy to internalize new technologies and to improve KB Financial Group’s capability in utilizing digital technologies. SEA strategy will look for new technologies that can be applied to financial tasks through research and ideas and push for pilot projects by creating innovative tasks based on these research and ideas. IT Technical Innovation Center’s final goal is to provide optimal solutions that combine IT and finance to customers.
KB Financial Group is planning to open an idea market, which is applied with games and social functions, to look for internal ideas and it is also planning to compose omnidirectional technical partnership with global businesses and startup companies. Startup companies that are working on financial services can utilize KB Financial Group’s enormous amount of internal data and technical verification that is necessary for commercialization. KB Financial Group is going to push for ‘enhancement of testbeds for new technologies’ to secure capabilities in new technologies. It is going to apply technologies that are verified through public Cloud systems to its internal on-demand system and find out their values within actual financial services.
KB Financial Group also established a complete automatic environment where server resources and software are automatically installed with just single click.
KB Financial Group is also going to promote IT personnel. Through intense educations and pilot projects, it is going to internalize major technologies such as Big Data, AI, blockchain, and Cloud.
Industries are seeing that IT now leads on-site departments when it used to support on-site financial departments in the past as KB Financial Group establishes IT Technical Innovation Center.
“IT Technical Innovation Center will be utilized as a pipeline that extracts and applies new elements from our next-generation system ‘The K Project’.” said Chairman Yoon Jong-kyu of KB Financial Group.
Staff Reporter Gil, Jaeshik | osolgil@etnews.com