KB Kookmin Bank Partners with JPMorgan's Kinexys for Instant Dollar Payments

KB Kookmin Bank, South Korea's largest lender by assets, has partnered with JPMorgan's Kinexys to launch a corporate cross-border payment service in August. The platform will enable instant dollar payments to 10 countries, including the United States, Singapore, and India.

The KB Financial Group, which holds $552.76 billion in assets, is the 28th-largest lender in the Asia-Pacific region. This move marks one of the most significant deployments of Kinexys in Northeast Asia, following a string of regional banks adopting JPMorgan's blockchain rails over the past year.

Kinexys uses tokenized bank deposits on a permissioned network operated by the bank to facilitate transactions. Unlike public blockchains, Kinexys involves no public crypto tokens and supports programmable payments and near-real-time foreign exchange settlement around the clock.