SEOUL, South Korea—November 2, 2023— Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced that KB Securities, one of the largest securities companies in South Korea, upgraded its mobile trading system KB M-able on the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. The KB M-able trading system provides more than 2.34 million monthly active users with high-speed trading of shares, derivatives, and securities on mobile devices. With AWS as its preferred cloud provider, KB Securities is digitally transforming to provide customers with a secure, stable, low latency trading service that caters to a growing user base of tech-savvy mobile investors. With the breadth and depth of AWS capabilities, including security, networking, and compute, KB Securities can launch new services on KB M-able more than 80% faster. The company can also rapidly scale its platform to support 600,000 more simultaneous users than before with 10% faster access to trading data—allowing users to navigate rapidly changing markets more easily.
A new generation of individual retail investors, especially in Generation MZ (millennials and Generation Z), is driving exponential growth in demand for trading services in South Korea. Unlike traditional investors, like banks and brokerages, this new class of investors use mobile devices to trade and social networks to share stock information to generate wealth. To meet this demand for trading services, KB Securities needed to provide real-time stock information and process trading orders as quickly as possible. KB Securities uses AWS Transit Gateway to connect its Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and on-premises networks through a central hub, simplifying the bank’s network and acting as a highly scalable cloud router to bring latency down to less than 5.7 milliseconds, to accelerate transactions. With Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, KB M-able can easily cope with 20-fold spikes in trading volume during large initial public offering (IPOs). KB Securities can also easily and quickly scale its environment down to optimize IT costs and ensure there is no idle capacity when the market readjusts after IPOs. As a result, KB Securities has reduced its annual IT infrastructure costs by 16%.
KB Securities uses Network Load Balancer, a managed service that evenly distributes incoming network traffic across multiple targets like Amazon EC2 instances, containers, or IP addresses, to provide users with a secure trading service. The bank uses AWS WAF to protect its web applications and application programming interfaces (APIs) against common web exploits and bots that try to compromise security or consume excessive infrastructure resources. With its infrastructure secured on the world’s leading cloud, KB Securities’ IT department can direct resources to more strategic work-like application modernization, the process of transforming monolithic applications into cloud applications, to improve disaster recovery capabilities and bring new features to market faster.
KB Securities plans to continue innovating with AWS, using technologies like generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) and machine learning (ML). With Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, which provides pre-trained, open source models to help customers get started with ML, KB Securities is exploring ways to become more productive and develop new services for its end customers.
“AWS has powered KB Financial Group’s ONE CLOUD, an integrated cloud platform for KB Financial Group, and KB Securities' digital transformation in a rapidly changing business environment, enabling the company to develop innovative new services 80% faster and more cost-effectively than ever before under a stable cloud governance system,” said Sungwoo Hong, leader of the IT Department at KB Securities. “South Korean retail investors are increasingly trading in the stock market using mobile devices, and with AWS, we have developed a service that can easily handle massive spikes in traffic at low latency, to give traders the edge they need to thrive financially. We look forward to leveraging generative AI services to drive customer-centric service innovation and engage with our customers on a deeper level.”
“South Korea’s financial services landscape is evolving rapidly as more people start investing, and cloud technologies, including AI and ML, are giving financial institutions in the country the agility to stay ahead of this evolution,” said Kee Ho Ham, managing director of AWS Korea. “KB Securities has adopted a bold digital transformation vision that puts the cloud at the center of its innovation drive. With AWS, KB Securities is providing increasingly sophisticated retail investors a trading experience that is engaging, safe, and extremely rapid. We look forward to helping KB Securities further innovate its customer experience with generative AI and machine learning services.”
AWS announced in October that it plans to invest KRW 7.85 trillion ($5.88 billion) in cloud infrastructure in South Korea by 2027 to meet the growing customer demand for cloud services. This investment is estimated to contribute KRW 15.06 trillion ($11.28 billion) to South Korea’s total gross domestic product (GDP) by 2027 and support an estimated average of 12,325 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs in South Korean businesses each year.
About Amazon Web Services
Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 102 Availability Zones within 32 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Canada, Germany, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Thailand. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.