We generalize the following univariate characterization of the Kummer and Gamma distributions to the cone of symmetric positive definite matrices: let $X$ and $Y$ be independent, non-degenerate random variables valued in $(0, \infty)$, then $U= Y/(1+X)$ and $V = X(1+U)$ are independent if and only if $X$ follows the Kummer distribution and $Y$ follows the the Gamma distribution with appropriate parameters. We solve a related functional equation in the cone of symmetric positive definite matrices, which is our first main result and apply its solution to prove the characterization of Wishart and matrix-Kummer distributions, which is our second main result.