KB Financial Group (Chairman Yoon Jong-kyu) will be the first South Korean financial business to carry out an unique experiment that completely overhauls organization system, operational method, and office space of its IT department. This is part of its ‘Digital Culture’ project.
‘Digital Culture’ project is based on cultivating business reform by providing optimal office space, digital device, and infrastructure to workers just like global IT businesses such as Google and Facebook. It has started on a project that completely reforms its internal businesses to become a digital financial holding. It will be interesting to see whether KB is able to succeed on innovating its financial IT section that is seen as the most conservative section.
KB Financial Group is planning to apply results it gets from Digital Culture project to KB Financial Town, which is expected to be completed in August of 2020. It is also looking into expanding various infrastructures to every field.
According to financial industry, KB Financial Group is set to carry out ‘Digital Culture’ project.
First, it threw away every PC of every employee from its IT group and installed about 2,500 Cloud PCs. This move includes maintenance personnel as well as outside project personnel.
These Cloud PCs are based either a zero client PC or an all flash PC. These Cloud PCs drastically reduce energy consumption rate compared to previous PCs. KB Financial Group’s goal is to implement green and clean offices and its goal for this year to complete installation of Windows 10 and 8GB memory on every PC. If an individual is absent, one can share information and report digitally by having an access to a central system. Every task is connected to a central storage where information is stored.

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<KB Financial Group is pushing for digital transformation. Developers are having a meeting using an electronic board at KB Bank’s IT Technical Innovation Center. Staff Reporter Lee, Donggeun | foto@etnews.com>

KB Financial Group is also planning to have its business meeting look like a business meeting from a global IT business.
In addition to digital report and meeting based on Cloud PC-based environment and tablet PC, office system within offices of every management and department heads is replaced with an electronic board (Samsung Electronics Flip). Information from Smartphones and tablet PCs will be written on these electronic boards in real-time resulting in meetings without any paper document.
KB Financial Group is also planning on implementing mobile environment. By establishing IT groupware as mobile environment, it is going to implement Smart Work environment so that anyone can read necessary documents and make reports and payments even if he or she goes out of his or her office space.
It is going to introduce horizontal office space that will provide identical office space to outside IT personnel and place 60 conference rooms in different locations of its building.
“We are going to successfully place digital transformation internally by completely changing IT group and culture that were based on vertical authority.” said Chairman Yoon Jong-kyu of KB Financial Group.
Staff Reporter Gil, Jaeshik | osolgil@etnews.com