KB Kookmin launches 'KB Golden Life' service
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KB Kookmin Bank launches the “KB Gloden Life Installment Savings,” a financial product for customers’preparation for old age. / Courtesy of KB Kookmin Bank
By Kim Jae-kyoung
KB Kookmin Bank has launched the “KB Gloden Life” service, a tailor-made service for customers’ happy and healthy old age.
Through the systematic service, the bank provides customers with such services as asset management and consultations for health, leasure and start-ups.
The bank, named by The Korea Times as the country’s leading corporate brand in banking, appears to have succeeded in shedding its image as a big and borrowing financial services provider by introducing innovative new services tailored to different types of consumers.
This represents an impressive turnaround for the bank that hit rock-bottom in 2010 when its finances were devastated by exposure to the country’s toxic real-estate market and its management was left in tatters after bad business decisions and corruption.
Fast-forward to 2012, and the bank no longer resembles the basket case it once was. The sharply improved measurements across sales, profit and financial stability suggest that the old banking heavyweight finally has its legs back.
Throughout its turbulent patch, however, the bank somehow retained its reputation for solid customer services. KB Kookmin recently topped the banking category of the Korea Productivity Center's National Customer Satisfaction Index (NCSI) for the seventh consecutive year.
However, KB Kookmin Bank CEO Min Byong-deok stresses that he strives to be exciting as well as dependable. He had been disturbed about the bank's inability to lure younger customers in its retail businesses, and had ambitiously backed a ``youth bank'' project targeting university students and office workers in their 20s and 30s. The branches, which resemble Apple gadget shops more than traditional banks, have been well reviewed.
“We are trying to change our management DNA. We admit we have been making decisions based on an aged concept of banking in recent years, but we are now trying to see things as through the eyes of customers,'' Min said.
“This will be vital to the prosperity and survival of the bank in this new age of competition.”
KB Kookmin Bank last year became the country’s first commercial lender to reach the 200 trillion won threshold in total deposits and is expecting to finish 2012 on a high note as well.
KB Kookmin Bank is also looking to expand globally, recently opening regional business headquarters and a new banking unit in Beijing. The bank has 10 business units in 16 countries, including nine branches in New York, Oakland and Osaka, and regional subsidiaries in London, Hong Kong and Cambodia.