The Financial Supervisory Service on Thursday launched inspections targeting nonbanking financial companies in South Korea, following its probe on the banking industry. The targets of the probe include 25 life insurance companies, 31 damage insurance firms and eight card companies, as well as savings banks and securities firms.The FSS will reportedly look into evidence of gender discrimination in the employment process and personal ties between applicants and high-ranking officials of companies.

South Korea‘s four securities firms have been slapped with a combined 3.4 billion won ($3.2 million) in fines for their failure to identify and verify assets owned by bedridden Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Kun-hee under false-name accounts, watchdogs said Thursday.The amount of the fine equals 55 percent of face value of Lee’s financial assets under the accounts not owned by the chairman, which came to 6.2 billion won as of August 1993. The four companies -- Mirae Asset Daewoo, S

The Korea Herald is publishing a series of interviews on promising startups in the financial technology industry. This is the 13th installment. - Ed.Despite having easy access to thousands of financial products in South Korea, as one of the world’s most wired countries, consumers often find most of them irrelevant and largely fail to figure out which offers the biggest financial advantage. In a bid to simplify the myriad of choices, former owner of a street food vender Kim Tae-hoon co-foun

Energy efficiency blockchain platform in talks with Hyundai, Kia

Top brokerage reels under aftermath of stock dividend error

Payoneer, a New York-based payments processing company, officially launched a new South Korea office Tuesday, targeting small and midsized businesses here that sell their products globally via online marketplaces like Amazon and Alibaba.　“Launching Payoneer’s office in Korea shouldn’t come as a surprise. Korea is a fast-growing economy and the seventh biggest e-commerce market in the world,” said Payoneer’s General Manager for Direct Business Eyal Moldovan during a

South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service on Monday began an investigation into Samsung Securities over it lacking internal controls to detect or correct a computational input error that caused slipshod dividend payments over 40,000 times larger than intended.The watchdog denounced the firm for its “severe” systemic flaw that enabled erroneously created virtual stocks to be traded like real assets.At a press conference Monday to unveil its plans to look into the fourth-larges

President Moon Jae-in appointed the incumbent head of the central bank to a second term Monday, stressing the importance of stability in monetary policy.Bank of Korea Gov. Lee Ju-yeol was appointed to his second four-year term in a ceremony held at the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae.Lee's appointment came about a month after the president decided to retain the top central banker for a second term.The 65-year-old is the first person in more than four decades to have been appointed to a second

A labor union of South Korean bank employees is demanding bank branches here close during lunchtime in forthcoming collective bargaining talks.  The Korean Financial Industry Union was reported as saying Monday the proposal was designed to guarantee bank clerks get an hourlong lunch break. The KFIU is an umbrella group representing labor unions of over 30 financial institutions, including local commercial banks, provincial banks and co-ops.Korean banks, with few exceptions, are open to cust

A South Korean brokerage mistakenly paying 1,000 shares in dividends instead of 1,000 won ($0.93) due to a computational error Friday has exposed a major loophole in the nation’s stock trading system, prompting immediate intervention by regulators.Starting Monday, the Financial Supervisory Service will launch an inspection into internal system flaws at Samsung Securities, the nation’s fourth-largest brokerage, where the incident happened last week, officials said Sunday. The authorit

Real interest rates offered by South Korean lenders fell into minus territory last year, with people effectively losing money if they make deposits, central bank data showed Sunday.The Bank of Korea said the average annual interest rate for savings accounts stood at 1.56 percent, compared with inflation that reached 1.9 percent, resulting in a real interest rate of minus 0.34 percent.It said average interest rate numbers for 2017 were the second lowest in history and marked the first time in six

Prosecutors on Friday requested court warrants to arrest four executives of two cryptocurrency exchanges on fraud and embezzlement charges.Kim Ik-hwan, head of Coinnest, and three others are accused of pocketing billions of won from clients' accounts by transferring the money to their own private accounts, according to the Seoul Southern District Prosecutors' Office. A court review on the request will be held early Friday, it said. They were detained for questioning Wednesday.  Prosecutors

Contrary to market expectations for Celltrion to avoid short selling by moving from the second-tier Kosdaq market to the first-tier Kospi in February, the ratio of the firm’s short sellers have increased since then, data showed Thursday. Of the entire daily trading from Feb. 9 to Monday, short selling accounted for 13.8 percent. The figure saw an upshot from the yearly estimate until Feb. 9 this year, at 8.4 percent. By month, the average short selling ratio came to 13.6 percent in March,

Local lenders are expected to tighten their guidelines on household loans in the second quarter of this year amid government-led measures to control the overheated real estate market, central bank data showed Thursday.The overall index measuring banks' "attitude" toward extending loans to households came to minus seven for the April-June period, compared with minus 10 a quarter earlier, according to data by the Bank of Korea.A reading below zero means banks will implement tougher scree

The chief executive officer and high-ranking executives of South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinnest were detained Wednesday on charges of fraud and embezzlement, according to prosecutors Thursday. This is the first time an operator of a cryptocurrency exchange in Korea has been charged.Prosecutors are seeking arrest warrants for the executives, including CEO Kim Ik-hwan, in the next two days. They are alleged to have swindled customers of digitized assets for their personal accounts, prosec