CUSTOMER IMPACT STORIES WITH EDB
How Shinhan EZ Insurance Built a Cloud-Native Core Banking System on EDB Postgres® AI
Discover how Shinhan EZ Insurance completed Korea’s first full core banking migration to the public cloud on a sovereign, open source foundation.
Listen and learn:
- How a fast-growing digital insurer outgrew the licensing and scalability limits of legacy DBMS solutions such as Oracle and Sybase
- Why EDB emerged as the clear choice with Oracle compatibility, dramatic TCO reduction, and enterprise-grade support
- How Shinhan EZ Insurance recovered its full investment costs within six months and cut annual operating costs by more than 50%
- How a sophisticated three-tier active/standby/read-only architecture delivers both load distribution and maximum availability for a 24/7 financial system
- What's next: AI, big data, and the vision of a digital insurance company that serves customers on their terms
Shinhan EZ Insurance has grown rapidly as an innovator in Korea’s general insurance market by expanding digital channels, forging new partnerships, and building products designed to meet customers where they are. Sustaining that pace demanded infrastructure built for a different era than the one legacy systems were designed for.
Jin-sun Kim, infrastructure lead on the IT Planning Team, shares how Shinhan EZ Insurance became the first company in Korea’s non–life insurance industry to migrate an entire core banking system to the public cloud, and why EDB Postgres AI (EDB PG AI) was the foundation that made it possible.
“We recovered our investment costs within just 6 months of adopting EDB and reduced annual operating costs by more than 50%.”
— Jin-sun Kim, Infrastructure Lead on the IT Planning Team, Shinhan EZ Insurance
From legacy lock-in to cloud-native freedom
The decision to migrate a core banking system to the public cloud is not one financial institutions make lightly. For Shinhan EZ Insurance, a rapidly evolving market demanded IT infrastructure that could scale quickly and respond to new business demands without friction. The existing stack couldn’t deliver that.
Legacy DBMS solutions—Oracle and Sybase among them—carried rigid licensing structures that directly undermined the cloud’s core promise of elastic, on-demand scalability. Beyond flexibility, the cost trajectory was untenable: Maintenance costs were on a continuous upward path with no natural ceiling.
Staying the course meant accepting growing constraints on the business at the exact moment when speed, agility, and sovereignty mattered most.
Choosing EDB: Three criteria that decided it
After evaluating a range of DBMS options, Shinhan EZ Insurance converged on EDB based on three decisive factors.
The first was compatibility. EDB PG AI’s high compatibility with Oracle meant the team could minimize application modifications and dramatically reduce migration risk, a critical consideration when moving mission-critical financial infrastructure.
The second was total cost of ownership. Compared to the legacy licensing model, EDB’s cost structure was substantially more rational, making large-scale infrastructure transformation financially viable.
The third was support. In a financial system where 24/7 availability is nonnegotiable, the quality of the partner matters as much as the technology. EDB’s global engineering team and professional support structure played a decisive role in giving Shinhan EZ Insurance the confidence to proceed.
“EDB’s professional support structure, backed by a global engineering team, played a decisive role in securing our operational stability,” Kim notes.
A migration built for zero disruption
The migration of EZONE, Shinhan EZ Insurance’s next-generation core banking system, was executed with data integrity and service continuity as the governing priorities. Using EDB’s Migration Toolkit, the team moved methodically to minimize downtime and ensure that when the cutover came, it happened cleanly.
The resulting architecture reflects the demands of a financial environment that cannot afford disruption. Standard operational databases run on an active/standby configuration using LifeKeeper. For the most critical systems—insurance core, channel systems, and customer data—a replica layer was added on top of standard redundancy, creating a sophisticated three-tier active/standby/read-only architecture that achieves both load distribution and maximum availability simultaneously.
The outcome speaks for itself: Shinhan EZ Insurance is currently maintaining highly stable service across its cloud environment, on infrastructure that can scale without constraint.
A sovereign data and AI foundation for what comes next
The business impact has been measurable and rapid. Shinhan EZ Insurance recovered its full investment costs within six months of adopting EDB and reduced annual operating costs by more than 50% compared to the previous environment.
But Kim points to something harder to quantify as the more significant achievement: the ability to immediately support new services requested by business teams, without infrastructure becoming the bottleneck.
“Our greatest achievement is the ability to instantly support new services requested by business teams—made possible by a stable, highly scalable infrastructure,” he says.
Looking ahead, Shinhan EZ Insurance intends to extend EDB PG AI as the standard infrastructure for new business expansions, while continuing to integrate AI and big data capabilities into its operations. That future—AI-integrated, cloud-native, built for continuous expansion—depends on owning the infrastructure underneath it. The sovereign data and AI foundation Shinhan EZ Insurance has built with EDB makes it possible.