South Korea's top financial regulator, a government commission in Seoul that sets policy and rules for banking, insurance and capital markets.
Korean savings banks cut delinquency to 6.04% from 8.52% largely by selling bad PF loans to funds, Seoul Economic Daily reported. Their fund certificates have more than doubled to 7.8 trillion won, so part of the loss risk stays with them.
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South Korea's finance ministry, central bank and regulators will monitor markets jointly in real time after the KOSPI fell to a six-month low of 5,554. Officials blame rate expectations, AI-chip doubts and oil, and the measures reported are monitoring and enforcement.
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South Korean banks' household loans grew 600 billion won in September, down from 3.5 trillion won in August, according to Bank of Korea data. Corporate loans rose 10.7 trillion won in the same month, so bank balance sheets grew anyway.
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South Korea's Financial Services Commission said about 100,000 cases of personal data leaks are presumed across 16 financial institutions. The affected firms are still checking for further breaches, so the figure is an interim count.
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South Korea will move the Financial Services Commission and its Financial Intelligence Unit, 420 staff in all, to Sejong in the second half of 2027. Critics say distance will slow crisis response, but the evidence so far is one October meeting and a survey of another agency.
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Reuters estimates US banks would pay $79 billion more in annual interest if AI agents moved $3.8 trillion of savings into 4% accounts. That is enough to erase the net income of 32 banks, but only if every dollar of that pool moves.
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Citibank and Bank of America each have about 3,400 dedicated cybersecurity staff, 34 to 47 times the headcount at Korea's four largest banks. Scaled for the 10-to-12-fold asset gap, the lead is 2.8 to 4.7 times on staff and 1.8 to 3.7 times on spending.
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Honest AI pitched a sale of itself to Toss in July and October, Seoul Economic Daily reported, before and after signing a statement aimed at Toss's P2P entry. Honest AI denies it. If the report holds, it was offering Toss the affiliate-run lender that the statement calls a conflict.
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Korea is weighing bank security rules tiered by size, under which banks that earned 13.8 trillion won in six months would loosen network separation first. Savings banks, credit unions and community co-ops lost about 99.9 billion won between them, and for them the idea on the table is a pooled security service.
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ARTEX's developer made the open-source agent closed-source on October 8 after CrowdStrike linked it to a China-based 26-year-old who breached South Korean banks. The campaign exposed roughly 68,000 customer records, Cryptobriefing reported.
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Fitch expects the possibly AI-assisted breaches at nine South Korean banks to bring penalties, compensation costs and higher security spending. No material losses have appeared yet, so the early cost lands on bank budgets while incident counts in Korea and Japan keep rising.
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Korea's Financial Supervisory Service told financial firms that blocking the 30 IP addresses tied to suspected AI-agent attacks will not be enough. Attackers can swap addresses through proxies, so the regulator wants firms to judge how requests behave.
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Gwangju Bank and Toss have completed a trial letting customers pay merchants in stablecoins by scanning a QR code, Yonhap reported. Lawmakers review digital-asset legislation in November, and the Korean bank and fintech stablecoin work on record so far consists of tests and study agreements.
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President Lee Jae-myung ordered a full probe of hacks that exposed data at four Korean banks, including about 25,000 Shinhan Bank customers. The response runs through every financial industry association before the probe has shown whether the banks share a weak point.
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Shinhan Bank exposed data on about 25,000 customers through a loan-broker inquiry platform kept apart from its core banking systems. Yonhap reports AI may have automated the credential stuffing, so the side systems that touch customer data are where lenders' security spending now gets tested.
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Korea's National Police Agency booked the AI-driven attack on Shinhan Bank as a criminal case and assigned 28 cyberterrorism investigators to it. Whether the case moves to the new Serious Crimes Investigation Agency turns on how the Financial Services Commission classifies the bank's system.
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Korean companies paid about $620 million in stablecoins between 2021 and September 2026, Allium data show, through affiliates and partners abroad. Whether that flow returns once Seoul's stablecoin bill arrives depends most on small exporters whose foreign buyers asked to pay this way.
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South Korea's new Major Crimes Investigation Agency gave all 22 Seoul office posts it has filled to former prosecutors. Companies under financial-crime investigation will face prosecutor-trained investigators at an agency built to split investigation from indictment.
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South Korea's Supreme Court ruled that gathering proxies for one meeting does not make shareholders joint holders under the 5% disclosure rule. A group owning under 5% can collect revocable proxies and vote them without filing a stake report.
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South Korea's five big crypto exchanges traded about 20.5 trillion won in the week to Oct. 2, down 19.56% from the week before. At about 2.9 trillion won a day, the week ran at the first-half average regulators reported on Oct. 1, so trading is back at the year's pace after one busier week.
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Invest · October 1, 2026 · Confirmed3 publishers
Invest · August 20, 2026 · Confirmed3 publishers