SEOUL, Dec. 5 (Korea Bizwire) — Woori Bank has begun displaying Bitcoin price data alongside exchange rates and stock indexes on the electronic board inside its main dealing room in central Seoul, the bank said Friday — a first among South Korea’s commercial banks and a notable sign of the industry’s growing embrace of digital assets. [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 4 (Korea Bizwire) — Amid heightened foreign-exchange volatility this year, South Korea’s major banks have taken markedly different approaches to managing currency risk, newly released filings show. According to third-quarter disclosures from the country’s four largest lenders — KB Kookmin, Shinhan, Hana and Woori — all maintained “long” positions in foreign currency, meaning they [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 3 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s construction downturn is continuing to weigh heavily on the nation’s banks, with major lenders reporting persistently high levels of bad loans tied to the troubled sector. According to third-quarter disclosures released on Wednesday, the country’s five major banks — KB Kookmin, Shinhan, Hana, Woori and NH NongHyup — [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 24 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean brokerage houses are expanding their workforces for the first time in three years, buoyed by a roaring stock market and renewed momentum in investment banking and digital services. As of the end of September, the nation’s 60 securities firms employed 39,238 people, up 398, or about 1 percent, [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 21 (Korea Bizwire) — KB Kookmin Bank, one of South Korea’s major lenders, has decided to suspend new household loans for home purchases for the rest of 2025 amid government efforts to cool an overheated property market and curb household lending, officials said Friday. New applications for mortgage loans for home purchases will [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 18 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea has secured a decisive victory in its protracted legal war with Lone Star Funds, closing a contentious chapter that has shaped the country’s financial and political landscape for more than two decades. The U.S. private equity firm—long criticized in Korea as a predatory “vulture fund”—first entered the market [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 5 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s top financial regulator vowed Wednesday to reconsider compensation standards for investors in the so-called Belgian Fund scandal if evidence of mis-selling is confirmed, as part of a broader push to strengthen consumer protection in the financial sector. Lee Chan-jin, governor of the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), made the [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 30 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s financial authorities are moving to tighten oversight of insurance agents in an effort to curb their involvement in fraud, introducing measures that would mandate pre-screening and expand public disclosures of disciplinary records. The Financial Services Commission said Wednesday it discussed the reforms during a meeting of the Insurance [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 7 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s non-life insurers are escalating a fierce competition to secure “exclusive usage rights,” which grant temporary monopolies over newly developed insurance products, as the industry pushes for innovation amid slowing growth in traditional sectors such as auto coverage. According to the General Insurance Association of Korea, domestic insurers [...]
SEOUL, Sept. 2 (Korea Bizwire) — Worker productivity at South Korea’s five largest commercial banks jumped nearly 27 percent in the first half of 2025, topping 200 million won ($147,000) per employee for the first time, according to regulatory filings. The gains narrowed a long-standing gap with internet-only banks, whose per-capita profit, while still higher [...]