In August, KB Kookmin Bank, the biggest bank in South Korea, will start a new service allowing businesses to make international payments. This service will use Kinexys, a secure blockchain platform created by JPMorgan. KB Kookmin is the first South Korean bank to use this network for settling payments in U.S. dollars.
Key Takeaways
- KB Kookmin Bank will launch Kinexys-based USD payments to 10 countries next month.
- Parent KB Financial Group holds $552.76 billion in assets, Asia-Pacific’s 28th-largest lender.
- Kinexys has processed over $4 trillion cumulatively, with daily volume exceeding $7 billion.
What Was Announced Exactly
In August 2026, KB Kookmin Bank – part of KB Financial Group – will launch a new service to help businesses send U.S. dollars internationally. This service will support USD transfers to ten countries: the United States, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, India, Thailand, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, South Africa, and also within South Korea itself.
With $552.76 billion in assets, KB Financial Group is the biggest financial institution in South Korea and ranks as the 28th-largest bank in the Asia-Pacific region. This new development represents a major expansion for the platform in Northeast Asia, building on a trend of regional banks adopting JPMorgan’s blockchain technology over the last year.
How Kinexys Actually Works
As a crypto investor, I’ve been following JPMorgan’s Kinexys – it used to be called Onyx – and it’s a pretty interesting approach to payments. Basically, it lets big companies move money around and handle different currencies using digital versions of their existing bank deposits. It’s built on blockchain technology, but it’s a ‘permissioned’ network, meaning JPMorgan controls who can participate. What’s different from something like Ethereum or Solana is that it doesn’t use public crypto tokens. Instead, it’s more about digitizing what banks already do, and it actually *works with* systems like SWIFT instead of trying to replace them. So, it’s blockchain for institutions, but it’s not the decentralized crypto world many of us are used to.
The platform supports programmable payments and near-real-time foreign exchange settlement around the clock, a structural shift from correspondent banking, where cross-border transfers can take one to several business days to clear cut-off windows and intermediary banks. Kinexys by J.P. Morgan’s global co-head Kara Kennedy described the pitch to prospective bank partners in January 2026, saying blockchain can touch almost every part of the financial services industry and that it opens the potential for speed, transparency and much greater programmability.
Since its beginning, the platform has handled over $4 trillion in transactions, now averaging more than $7 billion each day. It initially worked with U.S. dollars, euros, and British pounds, but has since expanded to include Australian, Hong Kong, and Japanese currency, as well as Chinese renminbi and Singapore dollars.
Companies like Payoneer are already using the platform to handle payments in Australian dollars, and JERA Global Markets, a part of a large Japanese energy firm, uses it for accounts in Japanese yen.
TopMob reported late last year that Singapore’s DBS Bank also struck an interoperability agreement with Kinexys to let institutional clients move tokenized deposits between the two banks’ platforms across borders in real time.
More on the Development
KB Kookmin Bank isn’t focusing solely on Kinexys in its blockchain efforts. The bank is also involved in a new South Korean payment system using deposit tokens, which was revealed on July 23, 2026. This initiative is part of the Bank of Korea’s larger Project Hangang, aiming to create a digital version of the won currency.
As a researcher tracking financial innovation, I’ve observed that this institution has been quite active in exploring tokenized finance. This year alone, they’ve participated in both issuing digital bonds on blockchain and piloting stablecoins, making them one of the leading traditional lenders experimenting with these technologies in the region.
2026-07-27 13:28