Guided by the strategies of reaching out to AEC+3 (China, Japan and South Korea), KASIKORNBANK (KBank) has expanded its business into China, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam in the form of local banks, joint ventures and branches. To this end, KBank has adopted an asset-light strategy while focusing its efforts on synergy and collaboration with our partners in various forms with the aim of providing greater customer convenience via digital channels to ensure their improved access to financial services.

Even though the number of KBank branches in each country is limited, the Bank can provide comprehensive services thanks to its technology deployment as evidenced by digital lending, mobile banking, payment systems and funds transfer rolled out to customers. KASIKORN Business-Technology Group (KBTG), as KBank’s tech arm, has a capable management and technology team that is geared up for developing services that are at the market forefront and competitive in any circumstances. 

KBTG has therefore established the Software Development Excellence department along with the DevX team to provide additional support for developers and thus ensure the utmost efficiency, slashing redundancy while also bolstering digital services in the regional arena. The latest move reinforces KBTG’s strategy of striving towards being the best tech company in Southeast Asia and emerging as a world-class technology specialist by 2025.

Mr. Jirat Srisawat, Assistant Managing Director of Software Development Excellence, said that the new department – set up in February – will serve as a central unit dedicated to studying the software development process and enhancement of automated tools for the highest efficiency and effectiveness in this field. Its work also involves closing operational gaps and determining best practice. The Software Development Excellence department comprises four teams, namely Agile, DevOps, Software Development Methodology and DevX. Of the four teams, the DevX or Development Excellence team was first established from the KBTG Transformation Program. Its mission is to build the best practice for the success of KBTG and a platform for enhanced operational efficiency, and eliminate redundancies, to allow software developers to work at their full potential, with the assistance of the central software and automation.

The goals of the DevX team are to create an enterprise common library to reduce redundancies in operations and better align languages among those operations. Moreover, the team is scheduled to build a knowledge management framework, based on a new practice. It will also explore new knowledge in-depth, analyze specific gaps within the company, and develop new software programs or tools to close such gaps, as well as upgrading the capacities of developers to be on par with regional standards. These goals are consistent with KBTG’s strategy of becoming the best tech company in Southeast Asia and global technology expert within 2025. With this in mind, the Regional Team has been established to support digital services at the regional level.  

One major challenge for the DevX team is to ensure that the team of approximately 100 people can work on different tasks by building a common library and central platform technology so that they can share work, reduce redundancies and increase time for innovation development so as to upgrade KBTG’s digital services in the region, including China, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Another goal of the DevX team is to increase the capacity for monitoring and testing the performance of applications from start to finish, or application observability in terms of logging, metrics and tracing. The DevX team has cooperated with the Infrastructure team to establish the standards and build a common library to pass on to the Application team. The team has also created a developer utility platform to enhance the quality and efficiency of automation-based development, which combines all of KBTG’s applications in a single, shared space for ease of management.

Mr. Jirat added that the essential skills for potential applicants to join the DevX team are not so different from those typically expected of a software engineer. However, instead of creating a software that caters to KBank or our customers, the DevX team aims to aid fellow developers – helping them to reach the desired results. Therefore, all team members must have a solid understanding of existing issues, act as KBTG developer’s advocates, and be fully committed to improving work processes. KBTG will have members of the Software Development Excellence department stationed in Thailand, China and Vietnam. Anyone who wishes to join the team can submit their CV for application at [email protected]