Traditional financial profit models are breaking down. The interest margin between loans and deposits has hit its limit, and big tech companies are erasing the boundaries of finance. Faced with choices for survival, domestic financial firms are turning to startups as a solution.
But this isn’t just about simple support or competition for investment. It’s a strategic shift in survival — choosing, experimenting together, and accompanying startups into global markets. This article explores where the Korean finance industry is headed in nurturing startups, and whether those choices can become future competitive advantages.
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KB Kookmin Bank is intensifying its efforts to nurture next-generation unicorn companies through tailored growth programs such as ‘KB Unicorn Club’ and ‘KB Starters’. A key pillar of this strategy is a global scale-up strategy centered on Singapore, which is producing tangible business matching outcomes.
The ‘KB Unicorn Club’, designed for early-stage startups, has produced a total of 56 startups through its first five cohorts by 2025. At the performance sharing event held in December last year, the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) service provider DailyPay was highlighted as a standout success story. DailyPay, despite being a young startup, achieved annual revenue of 2.5 billion KRW by earning recognition for the innovation of its credit scoring model — demonstrating a successful cooperative growth model with the bank.
Across the broader banking group, the ‘KB Starters’ program has selected 394 companies so far and executed a total investment of 281.4 billion KRW. With participation from all KB Financial Group affiliates, the bank is actively advancing proof of concept (PoC) efforts that integrate startup technologies into actual financial services — helping companies establish themselves in the market.
A concrete example of the global strategy is the Singapore hub. At a demo day held in Singapore in November 2025, six promising startups — including PuriOsa AI and Sendbird Korea — delivered IR pitches in front of more than 100 global investors. These startups signed memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with local companies, marking significant commercial progress abroad.
Among these, companies such as Synergy Partners (with a vessel fuel trading solution) and Antock (an AI credit analysis platform) are leveraging Singapore’s geographical advantages to actively target the Southeast Asian market.
Rather than focusing solely on providing support, KB Kookmin Bank is reinforcing its role as a business broker — connecting startups with opportunities in the real market and helping them scale. An official from KB Kookmin Bank noted that ‘KB Starters’ has been identifying and nurturing promising startups since its launch in 2015, offering a platform where Korean venture companies can grow into unicorns. They emphasized that KB Financial will continue to do its best to build a scale-up ecosystem where both early-stage startups and mid-growth companies receive sufficient support at each stage of their development.
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