KB improves financial literacy
KB Financial Group Chairman and CEO Euh Yoon-dae, center, talks to Army officers about to be discharged from military duty during a job fair in September 2012 at Seoul Trade and Convention (SETEC) in Daechi-dong, southern Seoul. / Courtesy of KB Financial Group
By Kim Rahn
KB Financial Group Chairman Euh Yoon-dae believes that corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities should be linked to what the company does.
This is why KB’s CSR campaigns are focused on economy and finance education on children and collegians by taking advantage of the group’s knowhow in the sector.
In November 2011, the group selected education as its representative CSR project.
Not only incumbent workers but also retired employees have volunteered to participate in education work, while the group created 32 kinds of education programs.
Those volunteers have given more than 640 lectures on finance at elementary, middle and high schools across the nation since February last year.
The company also offers a one-day program at the group’s training center. Along with parents, participating children experience mock finance activities: they make accessories, supply them to a shop in the center, earn money, deposit it at a bank or spend it at other shops there.
“They can learn how to make, save, consume and manage money. Also, they donate part of the money collected through savings, learning how to help the needy, too,” a KB official said.
As the education program gained good feedback, KB began offering an online version of it in September, and launched a two-day program on Feb. 21 with 100 elementary schoolchildren.
“We believe the two-day program is more effective, so we’ll expand it. We’ll also offer it not only to children but also to the elderly who are relatively vulnerable to voice phishing and other forms of scams and those discharged from military service who will soon have to set up a plan for jobs and money management,” the official said.
Good jobs fair
KB has also been active in solving unemployment issues.
To relieve job shortage of small- and mid-sized firms and help youth land jobs, the financial group has operated a job market named KB Goodjob, linking employers and job seekers.
About 12,000 firms and 30,000 jobseekers have registered with the program for the last two years. “Such a large number of people have sought the job market as they trust KB’s network,” the official said.
In October 2011, the group held the first offline job fair in Incheon where 200 mid-sized firms and 12,000 jobseekers participated, with about 1,000 people getting jobs through the occasion.
In another fair in December that year, a video interview system was adopted, in which companies interviewed collegian jobseekers through video phones installed at KB Kookmin Bank’s smart branches.
The group held another fair last May, this time for ranking military officials who wished to find jobs after retirement.
For high school graduates who find it difficult to land jobs in financial industry, KB signed a memorandum of understanding with the education ministry to offer more job chances to them in March 2011, the first of its kind among financial firms.
Besides the education program and job fairs, each of KB’s 25,000 workers is engaged in over 10 hours of volunteer work per year, such as tree planting, book reading for children without parents, providing meals to the poor and elderly and offering relief supplies to natural disaster victims.