[Digital Today reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] "There is no problem, technically or in terms of regulation, with using cloud in finance. AI in particular will accelerate cloud adoption in the financial sector."

No Kyung-hoon (노경훈), head of financial business at Amazon Web Services Korea (AWS Korea), said companies face a burden in building AI infrastructure in internal data centres given how quickly AI technology is changing. "When new technology comes out, it could be hard to use it on the system you built," he said. He made it clear that, at this point, the answer is cloud-based AI that can respond flexibly to change.

At AWS Korea's GameDay event held on April 10 for financial-sector developers, he said AI is advancing fast enough that new technology could nullify earlier efforts. He said awareness is spreading in finance that it is hard to respond to AI changes without the cloud. He added that cases are emerging of firms that built their own systems and later switched to the cloud.

He said many organisations that built their own AI infrastructure based on small language models (SLMs) are facing performance issues. He emphasised that, in a survey AWS Korea conducted of IDC and about 150 financial firms, around 60 percent said they are using the cloud because of AI or plan to adopt it.

The GameDay event was run as scenario-based, hands-on application rather than simple theory training. Participants applied AWS services and architecture patterns directly in a risk-free sandbox environment, repeatedly verified them and solved missions, with points earned added up to select the final winning team. This year's GameDay gave missions on recovering from application failures in a virtual corporate environment and modernising legacy Java code.

Ninety-six people from 24 financial firms took part, spanning banks, card firms, securities, insurers and fintech. Banks included NH Nonghyup Bank, KB Kookmin Bank, Shinhan Bank, Hana Bank, Suhyup Bank, KakaoBank and K Bank. Securities and card and pay firms included KB Securities, Meritz Securities, Next Securities, BC Card, Hyundai Card and Kakao Pay Insurance. Insurers included AXA General Insurance, Seoul Guarantee Insurance, Mirae Asset Life Insurance, Lotte Insurance, Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance and Kyobo Life Insurance, while fintech companies included 8percent, Korea Credit Data, Goodrich, Tmoney Mobility and Viva Republica (TOSS).

No said many people use the term AI, but there are not many cases of actually applying it to development. He said he hopes GameDay will be an opportunity for participants to try it in practice and apply it after returning to their jobs.

AWS Korea also highlighted at the event that it will seek to expand its user base with Kiro, an AI-based development platform. Kiro is an agent-based development tool that evolved from Amazon Q Developer. It supports spec-driven development that sequentially supports the stages of organising requirements, designing and developing, going beyond simple vibe coding, or chat-based coding. When users enter requirements, AI automatically generates a list of requirements and acceptance criteria.

Tae-hoon Koo (구태훈), a senior specialist solutions architect for finance at AWS Korea, emphasised that it is useful at enterprise AI development sites spanning development and operations. He said organisations that are familiar with the AWS environment will be able to use Kiro more comfortably.