Kakao’s Compliance and Trust Committee, an independent body that supports compliance and trust-based management at Kakao affiliates, held its first regular meeting of the year on Jan. 12 and published the “Kakao Compliance and Trust Committee Annual Report 2025,” which includes the value of compliance management and its 2025 activities.

At the meeting, the committee discussed its annual plan and direction for 2026 and shared the annual report. The report includes activities over the past year by the committee and Kakao to strengthen compliance management and restore trust.

Over the year, the committee worked to spread compliance awareness across the group and improve systems based on three key agendas: responsible management, establishing ethical leadership and restoring social trust. To that end, the report introduced specific actions tied to 2024 goals of upgrading compliance systems at participating affiliates, strengthening ethics and compliance support, and building communication and trust.

The committee said it focused in 2025 on upgrading compliance systems to strengthen compliance management at participating affiliates. It developed compliance system evaluation indicators reflecting the characteristics of platform companies such as Kakao Group and conducted its first full-scale evaluations of participating affiliates this year. It presented each affiliate with final results and areas needing improvement, and said it plans to support ongoing improvements through regular assessments.

It also continues to review each participating affiliate’s detailed implementation plans for the three key agendas it recommended to Kakao Group in 2024, to support the compliance system taking hold in actual operations at each company.

The committee reorganised rules to help the detailed implementation plans for the three core agendas it presented in 2024 take root within Kakao Group. It also introduced an “investment checklist” to prevent potential problems in major investment processes in advance, enabling each participating affiliate to check compliance on its own during key decision-making.

It also set three core goals for the ethics committee — diversity, independence and fairness — and specified detailed criteria to ensure those goals are effectively guaranteed. It is also supporting the spread of ethical awareness through investigations of reports related to alleged compliance duty violations at participating affiliates, ongoing compliance support and compliance training.

The committee held an internal meeting last November to mark its second anniversary. Chair Kim So-young and Jung Shin-a, head of Kakao’s CA consultative body, attended and discussed changes at Kakao Group since the committee’s launch and the direction for future development.

Kim said the results of system improvements and building frameworks led to the formation of a compliance- and trust-centred culture across the organisation. Jung said she would seek sustainable growth by expanding the artificial intelligence ecosystem and pursuing global growth based on that culture, and expressed hope that the committee would become a discussion partner moving toward the same goals.

Beyond the chair-level meeting, the committee said it is reflecting internal voices in the compliance system by maintaining ongoing communication with management and Kakao’s labour union, Crew Union, to understand detailed conditions by area and continue discussions on the direction Kakao Group should take.

In a foreword, Kim said the committee had pressed ahead over the past 2 years with responsible management and restoring social trust as milestones, and assessed as its most valuable achievement that Kakao came to view compliance as a direction it must uphold on its own. She added that the committee would do its best by using criticism and reprimands as a compass to move in the right direction.