Overview
- KB Kookmin announced on July 26 that it will roll out a corporate cross-border U.S. dollar payment service in August built on J.P. Morgan’s permissioned Kinexys blockchain covering ten countries.
- The bank will be the first South Korean institution to use Kinexys for live trade payments, and the system will run on tokenized deposit accounts without any public crypto tokens.
- KB Kookmin plans to link blockchain settlement with existing SWIFT messaging and let clients access the service through its Korean branches and its Singapore office.
- J.P. Morgan says Kinexys has handled more than $4 trillion in cumulative volume with about $7 billion in average daily flows, and other adopters have cut some settlement times from days to minutes, lowering capital tied up in transit.
- The launch follows KB’s recent blockchain work, including a $100 million digital bond and participation in a government tokenized-deposit pilot, and key details such as fees, limits and the exact August start date remain undisclosed.