KakaoBank Awarded 'Republic of Korea Job Merit Commendation'

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Hyo-jin] KakaoBank announced on the 23rd that it received the ‘2020 Korea Job Merit Award’ presented by the Job Committee in recognition of its contributions to creating financial jobs and fostering a family-friendly corporate culture.

KakaoBank has been creating quality jobs in the finance and IT sectors and has been evaluated as establishing a virtuous cycle structure where employment and growth coexist.

The number of KakaoBank’s directly employed staff, which was 328 at the time of service launch in July 2017, has increased to 915 as of this month. Despite the spread of the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19), the workforce increased by 129 this year alone, with balanced recruitment across job fields such as finance, IT, and customer service.

KakaoBank is also leading in hiring female workers. The proportion of female employees currently working at KakaoBank this month is 48%. This is 6.01 percentage points higher than the average female worker ratio (41.99%) in the finance and insurance industries with fewer than 1,000 employees.

KakaoBank explained that it is committed to fostering a family-friendly corporate culture. It provides up to 110 days of 'prenatal and postnatal leave' and ‘paid health leave,’ and supports up to 10 million KRW for multiple childbirths. Employees with infants receive a monthly support fund of 100,000 KRW for two years, and the company supports operating expenses for three workplace shared daycare centers near the office.

KakaoBank was the first in the banking sector to introduce a comprehensive 'flexible working system' that allows employees to adjust their working hours independently, and it has implemented a sabbatical system that provides one month of paid leave and 2 million KRW in vacation expenses every three years of continuous service.

KakaoBank boldly abolished the long-standing practice of job group separation in the financial sector and applies the same welfare benefits and employment rules regardless of regular or non-regular employment. There is no rank system, and everyone, including the CEO, uses English names, fostering a horizontal corporate culture where free expression of opinions is possible.

A KakaoBank official said, "Twenty people are scheduled to join from the first day of the new year, and we plan to hire an additional triple-digit number of employees in 2021," adding, "We will continue to fulfill our social responsibility by creating quality jobs and corporate culture to make good jobs preferred by young people."

KakaoBank was also selected last year as a ‘Korea Job Excellence Company’ by the Ministry of Employment and Labor.

Kakao Bank's Shin Hee-cheol, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), and Job Committee's Kim Yong-gi, Vice Chairman, are posing for a commemorative photo at the '2020 Korea Job Merit Award' ceremony.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.