The Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK) held an expanded management meeting to review major business issues and discuss ways to support SMEs, including helping them prepare for effects of climate change and the green transition.
The meeting, held at IBK Human Resources Development Center in Chugju April 28-29, was the first since Yoon Jong-won took office as IBK president. All executives above the general manager level participated in the workshop.
“The purpose of innovative management is not only to increase the IBK’s competitiveness but to boost the dynamism of SMEs and Korean finance,” said IBK President Yoon, who is currently pushing to expand the roles of the IBK to support and nurture venture startups through a business trip to Silicon Valley in the United States.
Yoon called on IBK employees to increase their effort to strengthen strategies to boost the bank’s global competitiveness.
Yoon also emphasized the importance of not only innovative management, but also supporting SMEs and small business owners and faithfully fulfilling the original roles of the IBK as a leader in SME finance innovation.
ESG tasks selected in 2021 were reviewed, and the roles of the IBK for SMEs’ green transition were heatedly debated at the ESG/Green Finance Workshop on the second day of the meeting.
Participants had a heated discussion about the IBK’s tasks for growing into a global green bank for SMEs, such as the establishment of green finance management governance, the management of the IBK’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the expansion of green loans/investments, and the introduction of green transition programs for SMEs.
“The international community has long been demanding green finance leadership from banks,” Yoon said.
“But Korean financial institutions are still in the early stages of discussing and figuring out their direction. We need to provide guiding services that can take the initiative in the Korean financial market as a policy financial institution.”
In addition, as Yoon is leading the global discussion in the field of green finance for SMEs as co-chair of the OECD Sustainable SME Finance Platform, Yoon called for concrete measures to raise the level of green finance among Korean financial companies.
“I hope that more employees will participate and have more opportunities to communicate freely and honestly with the easing of COVID-19 quarantine guidelines down the road,” an IBK official said.
The IBK also announced in late April that it had introduced the eXplainable AI (XAI) technology and developed a package that will be easily applied to various financial services. XAI is AI in which the results of the solution can be understood by humans.
Existing AI technology is a complicated process. It is difficult to explain the reason for a result value. Experts say that it lacks fairness and reliability in fields that require explanation such as finance and medical care.
The IBK conducted a joint research project on XAI technology in cooperation with the Explainable Artificial Intelligence Research Lab at the KAIST for about 8 months from August 21.
The XAI model has been developed with an emphasis on expansion into financial services and has a distinctive feature that it can be easily utilized.
In the future, when banks use artificial intelligence in financial services, the XAI model will be able to provide more reliable AI financial services as it can provide a basis for judgment and an accurate explanation.
The IBK will apply this XAI model to its corporate forecasting models to provide forecast results and objective explanatory information to those in the field.
“We expect that XAI technology will have a big positive impact on various financial tasks such as marketing, reviews of applications for loans and credit evaluations,” an IBK official said.
“We will use this technology to bring innovation to our financial services.”
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