Kbank said on Wednesday it has built the banking sector’s first cloud-based research and development network. The R&D network is dedicated development infrastructure for verifying and testing new technologies and services in advance through proof of concept in an independent environment separated from the internal network.

The cloud-based R&D network maintains security while significantly increasing development flexibility and experimentation speed, and securing cost efficiency, Kbank said.

It is built as a cloud environment separated from the internal network, easing constraints in existing financial-sector development environments. With freer data imports and access to generative AI technologies, validation of AI and big-data technologies has accelerated sharply, and the period from evaluating the feasibility of applying new technologies to switching to actual services has also been significantly shortened.

Kbank also said development speed and validation efficiency improve significantly in developing partner business services. It can call partners' APIs first to verify quality in advance, enabling it to increase speed from the initial development stage.

On security, Kbank said it adopted a cloud-optimised security system to boost security. It applies a zero-trust security model to the R&D network to unify authentication and authorisation management and system access, and fundamentally blocks the possibility of security incidents such as malware intrusion and unauthorised data exfiltration.

By building the R&D network on a cloud basis, Kbank said it cut equipment and operating costs by about 70 percent compared with an on-premise environment using in-house servers. Under the on-premise approach, it faced various equipment costs, including securing computer room space, and a heavy maintenance burden, but it significantly reduced costs by shifting to the cloud environment.

Kbank plans to continue technology-focused innovation experiments based on the cloud R&D network, including advancing its microservices architecture platform, developing new generative AI services and introducing the latest security technologies.

A Kbank official said, "This R&D network build goes beyond constraints in financial-sector development environments and has created an innovative playground where developers can freely experiment with and take on new technologies." The official added, "We will strengthen our technological competitiveness centred on AI and the cloud and roll out differentiated services."