iM Financial Group is running the Fintech startup incubation program "Fium Lab," accelerating the creation of an innovative financial ecosystem. It is expanding open innovation by supporting every stage of startup growth, from providing office space to affiliate collaboration and investment attraction.
"Fium" combines "Fintech," "Innovation," and "umteuda" (to sprout), meaning "to make Fintech innovation sprout." Fium Lab is a program that discovers and nurtures innovative technology and service startups that can generate digital synergy with iM Financial Group affiliates, including iM Bank, iM Securities, iM Capital, and iM Life Insurance.
Since 2019, it has nurtured 86 startups and supported 32.2 billion won in funding for 48 companies. It is currently nurturing 14 corporations through the 8th cohort.
Fium Lab is characterized by operating support programs tailored to the growth stage of startups. It provides free office space at the Daegu iM Bank second headquarters and Seoul Gongdeok Front One, and supports proof of concept (PoC) and business partnerships for collaboration with group affiliates. It also offers an accelerating program and investment attraction linkage to help with commercialization and market entry.
A representative success case is the Fium Lab 6th cohort corporations "Buchigo." Buchigo successfully carried out Korea's first Blockchain-based prepaid payment service proof-of-concept (PoC) project. By implementing a prepaid-based payment structure linked to an iM Bank real-name account, it met regulations on real-name verification, anti-money-laundering, and protection of users of prepaid electronic payment instruments, and it verified consumer convenience and merchant economics by combining a Blockchain distributed ledger with the trust-based financial infrastructure required by financial authorities.
iM Financial Group plans to continue promoting financial service innovation and activation of the Fintech ecosystem by expanding collaboration with startups possessing innovative technologies through Fium Lab and leveraging digital synergies with its affiliates.