President Kim Ki-hwan of KB Insurance gives his inaugural speech as he took office at KB Insurance headquarters. (Photo: KB Insurance)

KB Insurance announced on Jan. 4 that Kim Ki-hwan officially took office as the new CEO of KB Insurance.

Kim exchanged his first official greetings with KB Insurance employees while taking the first step as the new head of KB Insurance by announcing his inaugural address through internal broadcast within the company and via YouTube broadcast in line with social distancing policies against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through his inauguration message, Kim announced his management goal of leading KB Insurance to the top of the insurance industry with innovative and creative insurance that can offer more benefits to customers by reviving the pride of KB Insurance.

Kim suggested three strategic directions and three promises to attain the goal.

“First of all, the first strategic direction is to give our top priority to making customers happy,” Kim said.

“KB Insurance should provide customers with the best products and services so that they can lived happy life.” Kim asked employees to create innovative products, services and channels that can provide value to customers.

Secondly, Kim called on employees to develop or create new products and services with differentiated competitiveness.

“In order to create differentiated new markets, we will actively implement Customer, Product and Channel (CPC) strategies,” Kim emphasized.

Kim also vowed to create new value by setting up a cooperative model in the insurance segment with the two other insurers of the KB Financial Group – Prudential Life Insurance and KB Life Insurance and actively generate and utilize synergies with the two sister insurers based on the competitiveness of the KB Financial Group.

Kim’s third strategy is to push forward with the most innovative and omnidirectional digitalization.

“At the moment, all of customers' daily lives are digitized,” Kim explained.

“Unless we secure digital systems that can meet customer needs, we will gradually lose support from customers and finally fail to receive attention from customers,” Kim said, asking employees to transform KB Insurance into a digital insurance company to think and move ahead while providing faster and more convenient services to customers.

“I will carefully listen to the voices of employees in the field and create an advanced organizational culture where employee can freely express their opinions to their bosses including the CEO.

If an employee fails in a task after making a lot of effort to complete the task, I will defend the employee and even bear the responsibility instead of him or her,” Kim continued.

“Let’s not fear failing and burdens of taking responsibilities,” Kim said. “Let’s make KB Insurance proudly attempt to take first place with an enterprising spirit and more advanced insurance policies that can give more benefits to customers.”

After the inauguration ceremony, Kim Ki-hwan visited a KB Insurance branch in Anyang, Gyeonggi Province, and greeted and encouraged branch employees and consultants, and carefully listened to their voices.

KB Insurance announced on Dec. 31 that it will release KB Hope Plus Children’s Insurance, a new-concept insurance policy exclusively for children with specialized coverage and new payment exemptions for children’s growth cycles for the new year 2021.

The biggest feature of the new insurance policy is that it not only covers about 250 different cases involving children but meets children’s medical needs such as fees for flu treatment and diagnoses of hand-foot-and-mouth disease and chickenpox and pneumothorax that frequently occurs in children’s growing process.

The insurance policy pays for diagnoses of amniotic fluid embolism and cerebral palsy and the birth of a baby with Down’s syndrome in order to provide more fetal and maternal care.

In addition, if an insured child’s parents comes down with a serious illness or falls victim to a disaster, KB Insurance will make the parent exempt from the payment of premiums and return already paid premiums to the parent.

“Other current child insurance focuses on covering children only,” a KB Insurance official said.

“But KB Hope Plus Children’s Insurance is characterized by the expansion of the function to make parents who are actually payers of insurance premiums exempt from paying insurance premiums when they have financial difficulties due to serious diseases or disasters.”