iM Financial Group is running a Fintech startup incubation program, Pium Lab, accelerating efforts to build an innovative finance ecosystem. It is expanding open innovation by supporting every stage of startup growth, from office space and collaboration with affiliates to investment attraction.
Pium combines "Fintech," "Innovation," and "um-teuda (to sprout)," meaning "to make Fintech innovation sprout." Pium Lab is a program that discovers and nurtures innovative technology and service startups that can create digital synergy with iM Financial Group affiliates, including iM Bank, iM Securities, iM Capital, and iM Life Life Insurance.
Since 2019, it has nurtured 86 startups and supported fundraising totaling 32.2 billion won for 48 companies. It is currently nurturing 14 corporations through the 8th cohort program.
A key feature of Pium Lab is that it operates support programs tailored to each startup's growth stage. It provides free office space at the Daegu iM Bank second headquarters and at Front One in Gongdeok, Seoul, and supports proof of concept (PoC) and business partnerships for collaboration with group affiliates. It also offers an accelerating program and investment-attraction links to help with commercialization and market entry.
A representative success case is Buchigo, a 6th-cohort corporations in Pium Lab. Buchigo successfully carried out Korea's first proof-of-concept (PoC) project for a Blockchain-based prepaid payment service. By implementing a prepaid-funds-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, by integrating a Blockchain distributed ledger into the trust-based financial infrastructure required by financial authorities, it verified consumer convenience and merchant economics.
iM Financial Group plans to expand collaboration with startups that possess innovative technologies through Pium Lab and, based on digital synergy with its affiliates, continue to drive innovation in financial services and invigorate the Fintech ecosystem.