Two financial units under the Samsung conglomerate -- Samsung Life Insurance and Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance -- unveiled plans Wednesday to sell off their Samsung Electronics shares by Thursday. Samsung Life Insurance, holding 8.23 percent of Samsung Electronics as of Wednesday, will sell off some 23 million shares worth 1.2 trillion won ($1.1 billion), so that its ownership ratio will decre...

A total of 62,000 employees and executives of South Korean steelmaker Posco working in 53 nations participated in an annual weeklong volunteer event for each of their working communities, the firm said Wednesday. The volunteer work included a project for coral reef rehabilitation in Pattaya, a resort city on the east coast of the Gulf of Thailand, where some 100 employees at Posco-SouthAsia and ...

High-net-worth-individuals who subscribe to private banking products were more inclined to invest in foreign countries than domestic, showed a survey by Korea’s brokerage house Samsung Securities. The survey was based on responses by 100 private bankers in Samsung Securities. The respondents‘ answers reflected thoughts of HNWIs -- who hold over 100 million won ($92,700) in assets individually --...

South Korean financial technology startup QARASoft on Tuesday launched a beta version of an artificial intelligence-powered application to forecast financial market movements. Dubbed “Kosho,” the robo adviser app is expected to offer a prediction for the following week, based on over 400 million financial market indicators for the last 30 years, accumulated and analyzed by QARASoft’s deep learni...

The Pohang chapter of Hyundai Steel’s labor union said Tuesday it had carried out a social responsibility program for 19 children from a local child welfare center. On May 23, the chapter’s 13 union members reached out to a child welfare center in a northern remote part of Pohang, a port city in North Gyeongsang Province. Through the volunteer activity, the union members ran a program that incl...

South Korea’s financial regulator unveiled Monday plans to create an electronic system to track real-time foreign stock transactions and changes in outstanding stocks, in order to ramp up oversight of securities trade here amid growing public distrust in the current system and hostility against short selling. Through a newly created monitoring system, the Korea Securities Depository would cross-...

Amid widening market volatility on looming rate hikes at home and abroad, investors have been taking to money market accounts to park their cash. One of such accounts by Standard Chartered Bank Korea, the local unit of the London-based banking group, offer investors not only a place to park cash, but also interest rate up to 1.7 percent a year before tax. South Korea’s current base rate is 1.5 p...

Four years have passed since Alex Tapscott, then a Canadian investment banker, published a seminal white paper that pictures bitcoin blockchain’s potential financial use free of intermediaries. The 32-page paper titled “A Bitcoin Governance Network” -- generated upon the request of his father, the author of “Wikinomics” Don Tapscott -- laid the foundation for the 368-page “Blockchain Revolution:...

South Korea‘s stock markets erased their morning loss in the afternoon Friday, dwarfing investor concerns about US President Donald Trump’s announcement to cancel a planned summit with North Korea leader Kim Jong-un in June. In Friday closing, the top-tier stock market Kospi edged down 0.2 percent from Thursday‘s close, narrowing down 0.9 percent loss in early morning trade. The tech-heavy Kosda...

South Korea’s central bank kept the interest rate steady at 1.5 percent for six straight months in a unanimous board decision Thursday, citing external uncertainties due to an upshot in capital influx and currency woes from emerging markets. Despite relatively solid economic growth at home and abroad, the lingering uncertainties and low inflationary pressure on the demand side here led to the “a...

US exchange operator CME Group has immediately suspended South Korea’s brokerage Hana Financial Investment‘s access to electronic trading or clearing platforms and markets run by the US derivatives exchange operator. Following the disciplinary action effective starting Tuesday, customers of the Korean securities firm are being banned from trading futures or options on CME Group’s platforms inclu...

The Korea Herald is publishing a series of interviews on promising startups in the financial technology industry. This is the 15th installment. - Ed. Four cryptocurrency exchanges -- Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone and Korbit -- have dominated South Korean trades on the highly volatile market, riding the bandwagon of futuristic technology and a wave of speculation. But with the volatile market now faci...

Banks in South Korea will see eased regulation when opening physical offshore units, as a revision bill gained approval from the Cabinet on Monday. Following the revision of the Enforcement Decree of the Banking Act, banks will be exempt from the obligation to report to authorities about the establishment of foreign offices or branches prior to the setup, unless the investment into the foreign u...

Companies listed on South Korea’s top-tier stock market Kospi saw their debt-to-capital ratio come to 111.4 percent in 2017, up 0.9 percentage point on-year, data showed Monday. The combined amount of liabilities of Kospi-listed firms reached 1,182.8 trillion won ($1.1 trillion), up 2.5 percent compared to a year prior, whereas the volume of capital came to 1,061.9 trillion won, up 1.7 percent, ...

The Daejeon Metropolitan City Government offered to partner with US computer software company Adobe Systems, seeking to bolster the digital literacy of its citizens, officials said Sunday. Han Sun-hee, director-general of the city government’s science and economy bureau, suggested Adobe establish a digital literacy education center in Daejeon, in a meeting on May 14 with Adobe Systems Chief Exec...