AWS GameDay 2026 for Financial Companies: KakaoBank's Back-to-Back Championship Story 🏆

KakaoBank's Kiki404 team won the championship at the 5th AWS GameDay 2026 for Financial Companies, finishing with a final score of 260,000 points. This year's competition featured 24 financial companies, and KakaoBank achieved back-to-back championships, following last year's win.

This year's competition moved away from last year's focus on infrastructure operations, instead testing how quickly and accurately participants could resolve real operational incidents using AI tools such as Amazon Q Developer and Kiro CLI. Participants had to resolve incidents occurring in a fictional 'Unicorn Rental Service'.

KakaoBank team's high-scoring strategy was as follows:

• Pre-prepared prompts: Before the competition began, they prepared prompts in advance for Kiro CLI persona setup, service anomaly detection, and CloudWatch dashboard deployment, maximizing their response speed.
• AI tool proficiency: Going beyond simple infrastructure checks, they focused on quickly finding clues from AI-generated results and immediately connecting AI to their code analysis and infrastructure inspection workflow.

Through this strategy, they earned about 120,000 points early on and maintained the lead, proving in practice that the cloud operations paradigm is shifting toward an AI-centered approach.