KB Kookmin Bank Goes Live with Calypso For Comprehensive Cross-Asset Support

San Francisco, April 04, 2011 — Calypso Technology Inc., the global capital markets platform provider, today announced that KB Kookmin Bank (KB), South Korea’s largest bank by asset value and market capitalization, has gone live with the Calypso system to support its Capital Markets business, including trading and risk management of derivatives, treasury, and collateral management.

KB was looking for a single cross-asset front- and middle-office platform to rationalize and standardize an existing complex and siloed infrastructure across multiple branches, which was making maintenance costly and labor-intensive. In an increasingly competitive environment, the bank needed to be able to manage trading, positions and risk across its complete range of treasury, cash and derivatives products on an integrated system to achieve enhanced transparency, efficiency and responsiveness. It was a further requirement that the system was expansive and scalable to support future growth.

KB’s vision to become a regional leader in derivatives moved them to select the Calypso system for its broad asset class coverage, robustness, and flexibility that will allow integration with its proprietary and third party data feeds and pricing models. The new capital markets platform from Calypso Technology supports increasing trade volumes and diversifying asset-classes.

Kim, Don Kyu, Deputy General Manager, KB Kookmin Bank, commented, “With Calypso Technology’s modern, flexible and scalable platform in place, we will be able to expand and grow into new and important areas of business. We now have a great opportunity to become a regional leader in derivatives, made possible due to Calypso Technology. We look forward to working with Calypso and are excited by the benefits that will immediately favour us.”

The functionalities of the Calypso system range from deal capture, desk-level risk and processing (trade lifecycle workflows) to position and risk analysis. With the new platform, a total of fourteen asset-classes will be covered such as FX cash and options, money market, fixed income, credit and interest derivatives, and collateral management.

“This project with KB Kookmin Bank, South Korea’s largest bank, further underscores Calypso Technology’s work in the East Asian markets and our expertise in cross-asset coverage, particularly branching into collateral management,” commented Charles Marston, CEO and chairman, Calypso Technology. “We are delighted to be working with KB Kookmin Bank and assisting them as their business develops.”

About KB Kookmin Bank
Kookmin Bank was incorporated in 1962 as Citizens National Bank (Kookmin is translated in English as Citizens National) as a government-owned commercial bank limited to providing banking services to private customers and to small- and medium-sized businesses. In 1995 the bank was privatized and changed its name to become Kookmin Bank. Meanwhile, the government's stake in the bank dropped to under 24 percent. Finally Kookmin merged with H&CB (Housing and Commercial Bank) in April 2001 to form the new KB, a powerhouse employing about 26,000 people and listed on the New York and Korea stock exchanges.

Today, in addition to its full range of consumer banking services, the bank provides corporate lending, investment services to its traditional small- and medium-sized business base, plus large-scale corporate clients.