KB Kookmin Taps JPMorgan's Kinexys as South Korea's Largest Bank Pushes Instant Dollar Payments

KB Kookmin Bank, South Korea’s largest lender by assets, announced it will launch a corporate cross-border payment service in August 2026 built on Kinexys, JPMorgan’s permissioned blockchain platform. The move makes KB Kookmin the first South Korean financial institution to settle commercial dollar payments on the network.

The service covers USD transfers to 10 countries, including the United States, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, India, Thailand, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and South Africa, as well as domestic transfers within South Korea. KB Financial Group, the parent company, holds $552.76 billion in total assets, making it South Korea’s largest and the 28th-largest bank in the Asia-Pacific region. This deployment marks one of the platform’s most significant Northeast Asian commercial integrations.

Kinexys, formerly known as Onyx, is a blockchain-based institutional payments platform that allows corporate clients to move funds, exchange currencies, and manage liquidity using tokenized bank deposits on a private, permissioned network. Unlike public blockchains such as Ethereum or Solana, Kinexys does not use public crypto tokens; transactions move as digitized representations of existing bank deposits and integrate with legacy infrastructure like SWIFT. The platform supports near-real-time foreign exchange settlement and programmable payments, offering faster cross-border transfers compared to traditional correspondent banking, which can take several days.

Since its launch, Kinexys has processed over $4 trillion in cumulative transaction volume, with daily activity now exceeding $7 billion. The network initially supported the U.S. dollar, euro, and British pound, later adding the Australian dollar, Hong Kong dollar, Japanese yen, Chinese renminbi, and Singapore dollar. Corporate clients such as Payoneer and JERA Global Markets already use Kinexys for settlement.

KB Kookmin is also participating in a South Korean government-led deposit-token payments initiative announced in July 2026, part of the Bank of Korea’s Project Hangang digital won pilot. Additionally, the bank has been involved in blockchain-based digital bond issuance and stablecoin experiments, positioning it as an active traditional lender exploring tokenized finance in the region.

Source: https://news.bitcoin.com/kb-kookmin-jpmorgan-kinexys-cross-border-payments/