KB Kookmin Bank is the largest bank in Korea and a market leader offering a wide variety of financial services to customers all over the world. For decades, the bank has accelerated digital innovation through redefining how it engages with customers and through differentiating its offerings from those of competitors.
The KB Kookmin Bank Capital Market Platform team has been experiencing challenges meeting internal and external needs. The team developed a need for flexibility and speed in order to quickly respond to fast-changing market demands and to offer the right services to customers.
The team’s first task was to enhance the existing trading system for in-house traders and dealers. The system was built by a third-party software vendor who charged a high license fee, and the maintenance was expensive because they had to rely on an external agency. In addition, the unfriendly UX and UI made it difficult to customize or implement new features, and the system had limited scalability to meet growing business requirements.
To address these challenges, the KB Capital Market Platform team decided to team up with Tanzu Labs to build an in-house front-end system which could be self-managed. While developing the new system, the team embraced agile development methodology in order to better meet unanticipated challenges and to design future projects quickly and securely.
Youna Kim, product manager at Tanzu Labs, coaching the KB Kookmin Bank Capital Market Platform team
Embracing the nature of continuous innovation
During development of this new system, Frontiers, Tanzu Labs educated KB Kookmin on agile best practices emphasizing continuous self-organization, testing, and monitoring for fast, secure, and frequent delivery. This was especially important for KB Kookmin Bank in-house developers, who sought flexibility, scalability, and the ease of maintenance required for ongoing development and updates.
The newly developed Frontiers is web-based to offer better UX and UI. Tanzu Labs built CI/CD pipelines in a restrictive network environment where dependencies are not readily available. The team also helped KB Kookmin Bank transition from deploying its apps as binary files on a set of on-premises servers, to deploying them as containers on a Kubernetes cluster hosted on the company's private Amazon Web Services (AWS) account.
KB Kookmin Bank Capital Market Platform team working with Tanzu Labs
As a result, the team is now more efficient in stabilizing the system as they can scale their servers without relying on a vendor, leading to reduced maintenance costs over time. Developers can now make incremental changes to their code throughout the day. The UI was translated into modular components, which makes implementing new features easier. With the move to hosting the app on the cloud, KB Kookmin Bank also expects reduced service costs from improved scaling, flexibility, hardware efficiency, and deployment automation.
Tanzu Labs coaching the KB Kookmin Bank Capital Market Platform team
Bringing the multifunctional teams together
Since agile development requires a cultural shift, another key mission of Tanzu Labs was to nurture new ways of working. Multifunctional product teams consisting of product managers, designers, and engineers were trained to adopt a product mindset and collaborate to deliver value.
Through the agile framework of extreme programming (XP), which utilizes pair programming, test-driven development (TDD), and continuous integration, multifunctional KB Kookmin Bank teams broke down knowledge silos, encouraged skill sharing, and advanced team building while increasing empathy and social interaction.
Developers were trained to evolve the product through an iterative development cycle based on ongoing feedback. Designers practiced user-centered design to create a positive reinforcement loop, where good user experience leads to greater business success. Finally, lean development practices encouraged communication between diverse functions in order to minimize risk while maximizing customer value.
Jinsoo Kim, product manager for the KB Kookmin Bank Capital Market Platform team, says, “Through working with Tanzu Labs and adopting the agile methodology, we are in a better position to develop new digital products for our customers while also strengthening our internal team’s capabilities and creating meaningful changes to our organizational culture.”
Tanzu Labs and the KB Kookmin Bank Capital Market Platform team
Permeating change through the entire organization
After the successful revamp of Frontiers, other teams at KB Kookmin Bank were so impressed by the changes they saw in the Capital Market Platform team that they decided to adopt the agile approach in their own development process.
Across the organization, various teams realized the value of agile principles, which empower them to respond to feedback and make necessary changes at any point in the development lifecycle. They also appreciated that a nimble approach to writing and testing code can deliver incremental value to the customers and the organization, while also making it faster and easier to respond to changing business needs.
Youna Kim, product manager, Tanzu Labs, says, “If we focus solely on the process, adopting agile principles is hard to do. You will be disappointed if you expect the right features to be developed at the end of each cycle. Adopting agile requires a cultural shift that encourages teams to work together towards the same goal. Tanzu Labs partnered with KB Kookmin Bank Capital Market Platform team to help build the right capabilities and skills, as well as culture, providing support and inspiration to accelerate its digital transformation journey.”
Leaders at KB Kookmin Bank expect to establish a horizontal and balanced team culture optimized for in-house development and DevOps and to evolve into an organization that enables smooth communication, collaboration, and quick decision-making.
Wooseok Kim, team lead of Capital Market Platform team, KB Kookmin Bank, says, “KB Kookmin Bank is continuously investing in internal innovation to lead the digital banking industry and develop customer-focused products and services. Through the partnership with Tanzu Labs, which turned out to be an opportunity for employee growth and organizational culture innovation, we will continue to strive to introduce a flexible system with high user satisfaction.”