KB Kookmin Bank Service

Upstage and KB Kookmin Bank have signed a strategic partnership to build AI services for the financial sector. The two companies pledged overall technical cooperation through a non-face-to-face signing ceremony, and they will strengthen AI competitiveness in line with the accelerating shift to non-face-to-face services in the financial industry.

The core of the agreement includes diagnosing KB Kookmin Bank's current AI status, internalizing finance-specific AI technology, developing an AI engine exclusive to KB Kookmin Bank, and designing a mid- to long-term AI technology blueprint. Based on this, Upstage will build advanced non-face-to-face AI services, such as AI virtual consultation services, in a form that can be directly applied to financial business.

Upstage has secured talent who have actually operated AI services at Naver, Kakao, NVIDIA, eBay, and others, and its founder, CEO Sung Kim, is a former Naver Clova AI leader and a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. CTO Hwalsuk Lee, a former head of Naver Clova Visual AI, has also joined the company, and based on experts in computer vision, NLP, and recommendation systems, Upstage is continuing discussions with various industries beyond finance.

KB Kookmin Bank's position is that, amid intensifying competition as ultra-large platform operators enter the financial industry, it will internalize its own AI capabilities to drive technological innovation. Upstage, for its part, established a Hong Kong office last December and has been working to secure overseas AI talent and expand its solutions.