The number of unused credit cards in South Korea has reached 23.1 million as of last month, seldom showing signs of a drop as card firms are reluctant to clear them for marketing purposes, the financial regulator said Friday.
The number of dormant credit cards has been falling at a slow clip since the beginning of this year, standing at 23.4 million at the end of April and 23.5 million in January, according to the data by the Financial Supervisory Service.
That roughly means every working Korean has at least one credit card that’s currently not being used, the country’s financial watchdog said. The FSS counts a credit card not in use for more than one year as dormant.
The FSS has stepped up efforts to instruct card companies to terminate dormant cards since failing to so can lead to an unnecessary high number of issued cards. But the industry has been less than willing to do so, as the unused cards offer them a chance for niche marketing, the watchdog said. (Yonhap News)
