The venue of “AWS GameDay 2026 for financial companies (AWS GameDay 2026)”, an AI hackathon held by Amazon Web Services (AWS) on April 10 for finance industry participants.

KakaoBank’s Kiki404 team took first place for a second straight year. Team members changed, but this year was the first time a team from the same company won the event for two consecutive years.

AWS GameDay was run as a scenario-based, hands-on competition rather than a theory class. Participants applied AWS services and architecture patterns directly in a risk-free sandbox environment and repeatedly validated them. Teams earned points for completing missions, and the totals determined the winner. This year, missions involved recovering from application outages in a virtual corporate environment and modernising legacy Java code. Participants carried out the missions using Amazon Q Developer and Kiro, AI coding tools provided by AWS.

A total of 96 people from 24 financial firms took part, including banks, card companies, securities firms, insurers and fintechs. Participating banks were NH Nonghyup Bank, KB Kookmin Bank, Shinhan Bank, Hana Bank, Suhyup Bank, KakaoBank and K Bank. Securities and card and pay companies 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. Fintech participants included 8Percent, Korea Credit Data, Goodrich, Tmoney Mobility and Viva Republica (TOSS).

KakaoBank has used AWS for a long time at the company level. The Kiki404 team said that meant there was no major difficulty in applying Kiro in the AWS environment to solve problems.

In an interview after the competition ended, the Kiki404 team said, “At the company level, we have been applying a lot of efficiency improvements and automation using AI based on AWS.” It added, “In this competition, we used the Kiro CLI and Q, and it was not much different from our usual engineering environment.”

Second place went to Suhyup Bank’s Dosi-eobu team. Team members Isul Kim (김이슬), Jae-yoon Lee (이재윤), Jae-sung Lee (이재성) and Jae-eun Lee (이재은) work at Suhyup Bank’s AX Innovation Office.

Participants said the AX Innovation Office is a newly created organisation this year. It is responsible for pursuing AI projects and service development, data-driven marketing, system operations and data engineering work.

Participants said, “At the company level, we are AWS-friendly and actively use Kiro.” They added, “Through this competition, we had a good experience solving problems with Kiro.”

Third place went to Korea Credit Data’s “403 Please (Seriously)” team. All team members took part in the competition for the first time this year. They said using Kiro at the company level helped them solve problems. Members said, “We actively use Kiro and Q in our daily work, so we were able to apply them naturally.” They added, “Kiro can link well with the AWS environment, so it is highly efficient.”

Korea Credit Data provides CashNote, a business management service for self-employed people.