SEOUL, Aug. 26 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s new law on peer-to-peer (P2P) lending is expected to help address deceptive practices and better protect consumers, industry watchers said Wednesday. The law, which takes effect Thursday, requires all P2P lenders to have paid-in capital of at least 500 million won (US$421,000) each and register with the [...]
SEOUL, Aug. 18 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s major banks are likely to continue to provide financial support for smaller firms and one-man operations to help them tide over the fallout from the coronavirus outbreak, industry sources said Tuesday. The country’s five key lenders — KB Kookmin, Shinha, Hana, Woori and NH Nonghyup — have [...]
SEOUL, Aug. 5 (Korea Bizwire) — Kakao Bank, South Korea’s top internet-only lender, said Wednesday its second-quarter earnings soared nearly ninefold from a year ago due mainly to more interest income. Net profit came to 26.8 billion won (US$22.5 million) in the April-June period, up 793.3 percent from a year earlier, the lender said in [...]
SEOUL, July 5 (Korea Bizwire) — The number of fake South Korean banknotes found here continued to decline in the first half, and the combined face value of the counterfeits also dropped sharply, central bank data showed Sunday. In the January-June period, the number of counterfeit banknotes found here came to 129, down 19.4 percent [...]
SEOUL, June 10 (Korea Bizwire) — Amid a shrinking economy due to the coronavirus, this year’s insurance premium income is expected to outstrip last year’s record. The Korea Insurance Research Institute (KIRI) reported Tuesday that income arising from insurance premiums, excluding retirement pensions, will reach 179 trillion won (US$150 billion) this year, up by 1.5 [...]
SEOUL, May 27 (Korea Bizwire) — Kyobo Life Insurance Co., one of South Korea’s leading life insurers, said Tuesday that it has started developing and operating its own insurance fraud prediction system that incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning technology. K-FDS (Kyobo Fraud Detection System) is a system that enables AI to learn insurance fraud [...]
SEOUL, May 6 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s top internet-only lender Kakao Bank said Wednesday its first-quarter net profit nearly tripled due mainly to increased interest income. Net profit came to 18.5 billion won (US$15.2 million) in the January-March period, up about 181 percent from a year earlier, the lender said in a regulatory filing. [...]
SEOUL, April 15 (Korea Bizwire) — BC Card Co., a credit card processing firm owned by KT Corp., plans to acquire a 34 percent stake in the internet-only K-Bank, the company said Wednesday. The move came after KT’s plan to become the biggest shareholder of K-Bank faltered due to a legal hurdle. BC Card said [...]
SEOUL, April 1 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s Internet banking services continued to grow in 2019, with the number of users and daily transactions climbing to new highs, central bank data showed Wednesday. The number of internet and mobile banking users came to about 159.2 million as of end-2019, up 8.6 percent from a year [...]
SEOUL, March 24 (Korea Bizwire) — The new coronavirus outbreak in South Korea has resulted in the rise of insurance subscriptions through online channels. Thanks to the ease of subscribing to insurance plans on the Internet or via mobile devices, the interest of the middle-aged as well as those in their 20s and 30s has [...]