SEOUL, May 23 (Korea Bizwire) – South Korea has trumped other Asian Pacific countries in terms of mobile financial service usage, a report showed Monday. Users in South Korea had over 7 billion sessions in banking apps in 2016, which was nearly four times as many compared to Australians, according to the latest report by [...]
SEOUL, May 18 (Korea Bizwire) – Citibank Korea, the local unit of U.S. banking giant Citigroup, said Wednesday that it will convert almost all nonregular workers on its payroll into regular employees by the end of this year. Citibank Korea said the beneficiaries include about 300 tellers and other workers with low wages, which account for 8.5 percent of its total staff. Bank CEO Park Jin-hei said the agenda to change [...]
SEOUL, May 12 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea has imposed a levy on financial firms’ non-deposit foreign borrowing to ease volatility in capital flows, the central banks said Thursday. The Bank of Korea said 66 financial companies, including 17 local banks and 34 branches of foreign lenders, are required to pay 0.1 percent of their [...]
SEOUL, May 10 (Korea Bizwire) — The number of foreign residents who took out life insurance policies here topped 200,000 in 2015, with their subscriptions rising at an annual rate of 16 percent over the past five years, industry data showed Sunday. According to the data compiled by the Korea Insurance Development Institute, a total [...]
SEOUL, May 2 (Korea Bizwire) — Nearly 90 percent of financial firms worldwide said their businesses are at risk from rapidly expanding fintech rivals and they fear losing revenue to the financial innovators, according to a new study released on Monday, in the latest sign of the growing influence of financial technology, known as fintech. [...]
SEOUL, April 27 (Korea Bizwire) – K-Bank, South Korea’s first Internet-only bank, has achieved more than half of its full-year target of attracting deposits just 24 days after launching operations, the nation’s financial regulator said Thursday. The pace of growth in K-Bank’s deposits is much faster than expected and the Internet-only bank is fueling increased [...]
SEOUL, April 21 (Korea Bizwire) – South Korea’s credit card companies are seeking to apply the iris scanner adopted by Samsung Electronics Co.’s Galaxy S8 smartphones on mobile transactions, industry sources said Friday, lauding the feature’s security compared with fingerprints and passwords. According to the sources, Samsung Card Co. is seeking to apply the iris [...]
SEOUL, April 19 (Korea Bizwire) – South Korea plans to launch a pilot project for a coinless society this week, South Korea’s central bank said Wednesday, a move that could enhance convenience for ordinary people. Under the project set to begin Thursday, consumers can deposit small change left from purchases of goods into their prepaid [...]
SEOUL, April 18 (Korea Bizwire) – Organizers of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games on Tuesday signed KEB Hana Bank as their main banking partner. The two sides recently wrapped up their negotiations that began in February and announced their deal in a ceremony at KEB Hana Bank’s headquarters in central Seoul. The bank will reportedly [...]
SEOUL, April 14 (Korea Bizwire) – Citibank Korea, the South Korean unit of Citigroup Inc., said Thursday it will offer financial services via online channels while closing about 80 percent of its physical branches in South Korea. Citibank, which recently announced a plan to reduce the number of physical branches to 32 from 133 in the country, has said it won’t slash staff, despite ongoing restructuring measures. Instead, about 800 workers at the branches facing closure will be relocated to either [...]