SEOUL, South Korea—June 29, 2023— Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced that KB Kookmin Bank, one of the largest banks in South Korea, is powering its Star Banking super-app and company-wide digital strategy using AWS. The Star Banking super-app provides 70 key financial services of KB Kookmin Bank subsidiaries and integrates finance and daily life solutions like KB MyData, KB Pay, KB Wallet, Liiv Next, KB Healthcare, and KB Real Estate. This delivers the bank’s 11 million monthly active users comprehensive user experience through one financial and life services application built on AWS. To improve the customer experience in an enhanced environment, KB Kookmin Bank undertook the AWS Well-Architected Review, a program that ensures an application or workload follows AWS best practices to meet business needs cost-effectively. With AWS Strategic Business Review, which enhances the bank’s cloud investments, KB Kookmin Bank has saved approximately 20% in operating costs.
By 2027, it is predicted that more than half of the world’s population will be daily users of multiple super-apps – a mobile app that integrates multiple services and features into a single platform. To meet this growing demand, businesses must make a wide range of services increasingly convenient to remain competitive and generate new revenue streams. Using AWS, KB Kookmin Bank provides users with a variety of life services, including the ability to make payments through KB Pay on the KB Star Banking super-app, manage coupons and points, and issue various certificates, including electronic signature and personal identification through the KB Wallet.
Since 2020, KB Kookmin Bank has been offering multiple financial services to customers using a broad range of AWS services. The bank uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which gives them the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes container applications in the cloud, giving the KB Kookmin Bank the flexibility to scale various applications, including financial and non-financial services. Using Amazon Aurora, a fully managed and scalable relational database service, KB Kookmin Bank can depend on and quickly process large-scale data of its MyData users to recommend financial services. With Amazon CloudWatch, a monitoring and management service, KB Kookmin Bank collects and visualizes real-time logs, metrics, and event data in automated dashboards to streamline its infrastructure and application maintenance.
“South Korea’s mobile banking industry is growing quickly with more sophisticated and innovative services being launched to help people manage their finances. KB Star Banking provides key financial services from about 70 subsidiaries under the wing of KB Financial Group as well as KB Kookmin Bank’s banking services, becoming a comprehensive banking platform that integrates the needs of customer’s everyday lives into one app,” said Sungjun Lee, Leader of Finance Platform Department, KB Kookmin Bank. “We are excited to serve our customers with new services and support using AWS.”
“The growth of super-apps in South Korea paves the way for organizations to expand to solve a variety of consumer needs through the ease of a single application,” said Kee Ho Ham, managing director of AWS Korea. “AWS has helped KB Kookmin Bank deliver a dependable mobile banking app that can easily onboard new services and functions that make life easier for users, while offering seamless transactions between different organizations. Combining KB Kookmin Bank’s financial expertise with AWS’s broad functionality can help the bank continue to evolve its business to anticipate customer needs, drive cost efficiencies, and provide more personalized products.”
KB Financial Group’s super-app strategy and its cooperation case with AWS was shared at the AWS Summit Seoul in May 2023. Link
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