SEOUL, May 4 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s central bank is expected to hike its key interest rate four more times by year’s end considering its hawkish stance shown in the minutes of its latest rate-setting meeting, global investment bank JP Morgan said Wednesday. On Tuesday, the Bank of Korea (BOK) disclosed the minutes of [...]
SEOUL, May 3 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s major listed companies remain undervalued compared with their global peers as their share prices slump despite a jump in earnings, data showed Tuesday. The price-earnings ratio (PER) of stocks listed on the KOSPI market had come to 11.1 as of Monday, sharply down from 26 a year [...]
SEOUL, May 3 (Korea Bizwire) — KakaoBank Corp., a South Korean internet-only bank, Tuesday reported a 43.2 percent jump in its first-quarter earnings as its customer base continued to expand amid the coronavirus pandemic. Net income came to 66.80 billion won (US$52.8 million) in the January-March period, compared with 46.66 billon won tallied a year [...]
SEOUL, May 2 (Korea Bizwire) — Toss Bank, one of the three internet-only banks in South Korea, said Monday it launched the country’s first banking services for foreign expats here to provide them more access to diversified services. Many expats have had difficulties in confirming their identities to open bank accounts here, particularly because the [...]
SEOUL, April 28 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s financial regulator on Thursday unveiled a guideline on the operation of “fractional investment,” vowing to step up monitoring of the fast-growing industry. The Financial Services Commission (FSC) also said it will determine whether fractional investment has the nature of “securities” by “comprehensively” taking into consideration terms of [...]
SEOUL, April 26 (Korea Bizwire) — Hana Bank, a major bank, said Tuesday that it has opened a branch in Taiwan, marking the first for any South Korean lender to start operation there. Hana Bank’s Taipei branch went in operation Monday, 10 months after the Taiwanese authorities approved the setup of the branch. Hana Bank [...]
SEOUL, April 26 (Korea Bizwire) — Controversy is flaring up over banks’ loan-deposit margins as households are suffering from higher interest rate burdens while banks are chalking up huge profits by raising loan interest rates higher than deposit rates. The combined net profit of the nation’s five major financial holding firms — KB Financial Group [...]
SEOUL, April 25 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean brokerage house Hana Financial Investment Co. said on Monday that it signed a deal to purchase 35 percent stake in Vietnam-based brokerage BIDV Securities Co. The 142 billion won (US$113.8 million) deal makes Hana Financial the second largest shareholder of BIDV Securities, bolstering its presence in the [...]
SEOUL, April 24 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean brokerages posted a 62 percent on-year gain in their combined overseas net profit last year on increased stock trading amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the financial regulator said Sunday. The country’s 13 securities companies reported US$305.9 million in overall overseas net income in 2021, up from $188.5 million [...]
SEOUL, April 21 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean investors’ holdings of foreign securities reached a new all-time high in the first quarter of the year on an overseas investment boom, data showed Thursday. Local investors held overseas stocks and bonds worth a record US$101.68 billion as of end-March, up 1.08 percent from three months earlier, [...]