KakaoBank said on Thursday that subscribers to its "government subsidy finder" service surpassed 1 million seven months after launch.

KakaoBank is supporting a process that allows customers to check government and public institution subsidies they can receive and proceed to applications, through the government subsidy finder it introduced in September last year.

The service simplifies the entire process, from entering basic information to applying. Users enter information via a chatbot, which then recommends personalised subsidies. If document verification is needed, users can also automatically retrieve information using scraping.

Among the recommended subsidies, users can set items of interest as "my saved subsidies" to receive alerts. 1 in 5 users uses the feature, and the average number of saved subsidies registered by those users was 3.6.

The subsidy drawing the most interest this year was the "2026 High Oil Price Damage Support Fund," viewed by about 200,000 people. Interest was analysed as having concentrated in line with the timing ahead of applications. Other programmes that followed included "K-Pass" (120,000 people), the "2026 Hope Savings Account" (70,000 people) and the "Kookmin Tomorrow Learning Card" (70,000 people).

About 20 percent of users were tallied as self-employed business owners. The service recommends subsidies suited to self-employed users by reflecting factors such as industry type, business size and location.

KakaoBank said, "As policy benefit information expands to about 7,000 cases a month, we improved convenience through personalised recommendations," and added, "We plan to continue focusing on providing tangible benefits."