Kakao Pay said on Sunday its regular shareholders meeting confirmed Shin Won-geun (신원근) as chief executive for another term. Shin's term is 2 years, through 2028.

Shin took office as chief executive in March 2022 and was reappointed once in 2024 before being reappointed again this time. During his tenure, the company expanded both business scale and profitability based on its "everyday finance platform" strategy, achieving its first annual profit on a consolidated basis last year.

Kakao Pay plans to expand existing businesses while pushing a next-generation finance strategy centered on AI transformation, user experience (UX) innovation and building a digital asset ecosystem.

In its existing businesses, it will expand the upstream and downstream value chain around key areas including payments, lending, investment and insurance. It aims to broaden its business scope through general payments, alternative credit scoring and consultation linkages, raising both the user base and profitability.

It will also strengthen its data business. It plans to use its data assets to precisely reflect financial needs by user and to increase user time spent and loyalty through hyper-personalised services.

To strengthen platform competitiveness, it will focus on finding new revenue models such as financial product comparison and recommendations and customised advertising.

This year in particular, it set UX innovation and a shift to AI-based services as key tasks. It plans to enable users to access hyper-personalised financial services more intuitively, while also strengthening financial consumer protection and internal control systems.

It will also step up digital asset-based businesses. Kakao Pay plans to respond to next-generation finance areas such as stablecoins, blockchain and tokenised securities (STO) centered on its "Super Wallet". It will also expand synergies with AI capabilities within the group.

Shin said, "Agentic AI is accelerating autonomous payments, embedded finance and hyper-personalisation, and on-chain finance such as stablecoins is reshaping global settlement infrastructure." He said, "The financial industry is at an important inflection point."

He added, "We will advance technology-based financial experiences through AI transformation, the 'next finance' strategy and UX innovation."