The Korea Times

Shinhan becomes 1st Korean financial group to establish holding company in Indonesia

Shinhan Financial Group has officially launched Shinhan Financial Group Indonesia, becoming the first Korean financial group to establish a local financial holding company in the Southeast Asian country, the company said Tuesday. The launch ceremony was held in Jakarta on Monday, attended by Shinhan Financial Group Chairman Jin Ok-dong and local financial authorities. The new structure places Shinhan Indonesia Bank at the center of the group's Indonesian operations, with the bank taking on the additional role of a holding company overseeing its local card and securities businesses. The restructuring follows the Indonesian government's announcement requiring financial groups to establish holding companies in December 2024. Shinhan began reorganizing its local governance structure in response to the requirement and received approval from Indonesian financial authorities in September 2025. The transition was completed on Sept. 16 following the transfer of stakes in the group's local affiliates, according to the company. Under the new structure, Shinhan Indonesia Bank acquired additional stak

Oct 13, 2026By Lee Hyo-jin

Shinhan becomes 1st Korean financial group to establish holding company in Indonesia

Economy

Early rate hike ahead of Fed's move minimized economic costs: BOK chief

Bank of Korea (BOK) Gov. Shin Hyun-song said Monday that the central bank's August rate hike ahead of the U.S. Federal Reserve's September move gave Korea more time to respond and helped minimize the economic costs of monetary tightening. "We signaled a shift toward higher interest rates earlier than many other major economies. By raising rates in August, ahead of the Fed's September hike, we bought ourselves time," Shin said during a parliamentary audit of the central bank. "Taking action early carries far lower economic costs than having to raise rates defensively in response to market pressure," he added. Shin said the preemptive move also helped guide market expectations, noting that the prospect of BOK's rate increases was reflected in bond yields and other market prices before the hikes actually took effect. The BOK raised its policy rate by 0.25 percentage point in both July and August, bringing it to 3 percent. The Fed raised its benchmark rate by 0.25 percentage point in September, its first increase since July 2023, to a range of 3.75 percent to 4 percent. During the audit, Shin

Oct 12, 2026By Lee Hyo-jin

Early rate hike ahead of Fed's move minimized economic costs: BOK chief

Banking & Finance

Less paperwork, AI-powered banking: KakaoBank joins race for foreign customers

KakaoBank on Monday launched a range of financial services for international residents in Korea, joining local lenders in the race to attract customers from the country's growing foreign population. The new offering from the internet-only lender includes checking accounts, debit cards, overseas remittances and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered multilingual support. "Even though banking has become much more convenient for domestic customers, foreign residents still face the kind of inconvenience we experienced in the past, when we had to visit bank branches just to open an account," Bae Jung-ho, head of KakaoBank's Foreign Customer Camp, said during a press conference in Seoul. "By providing foreign residents with the same app that our 28 million customers already use, we were able to launch more than 50 services at once," he added. KakaoBank's Foreign Resident Account is available to residents aged 19 or older who have an accepted form of identification and a mobile phone registered in their name. Applicants can open an account through a mobile chatbot in about five minutes, the bank

Oct 12, 2026By Lee Hyo-jin

Less paperwork, AI-powered banking: KakaoBank joins race for foreign customers

Economy

Korea intensifies efforts to track hackers behind bank cyberattacks

Authorities are stepping up efforts to identify the hackers behind an unprecedented series of artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted cyberattacks targeting Korea's major financial institutions, Thursday, as a global cybersecurity firm pointed to a possible suspect based in China. CrowdStrike said in a report released the previous day that the threat actor was likely a Chinese speaker and financially motivated. The firm assessed that the attacker may have been a Chinese-speaking individual, citing the use of ARTEX, a Chinese-developed autonomous penetration-testing tool and Chinese-language prompts observed during the attacks. In its report, CrowdStrike suggested that the attacker primarily used DeepSeek's V4.1-Flash as the large language model backend for ARTEX, while also using GLM-5.3 from Chinese AI company Zhipu AI and Grok 4.6 in separate Claude Code sessions. A key clue emerged from a Claude Code session in which the attacker asked the AI tool to draft a resume for a security researcher. The information entered into the session included an age of 26, an educational background at Sou

Oct 8, 2026By Lee Hyo-jin

Korea intensifies efforts to track hackers behind bank cyberattacks

Banking & Finance

EXPLAINER How AI emerged as new threat in Korea's bank hacking crisis

Hackers once had to manually test security defenses, identify vulnerabilities and work out how to exploit them. Now, artificial intelligence (AI) can do much of that work, requiring little human input. That possibility is at the center of Korea's latest security crisis in the financial sector, as investigators have found traces of an AI-powered autonomous penetration-testing tool in a series of recent cyberattacks on the country's major banks. Since last week, Shinhan Bank, KB Kookmin Bank, Hana Bank, Yegaram Savings Bank and BNK Busan Bank have all reported data breaches, while Woori Bank and NH NongHyup Bank have detected signs of hacking attempts, though no data leaks were confirmed. Shinhan Bank reported that about 25,000 customers were affected, with personal information including names, phone numbers, annual income and loan limits exposed. KB Kookmin reported 119 affected customers, while Hana Bank said personal information belonging to 89 customers was exposed. The hacking spree has drawn particular concern after investigators reportedly found traces of an AI-powered tool known as

Oct 7, 2026By Lee Hyo-jin

[EXPLAINER] How AI emerged as new threat in Korea's bank hacking crisis

Global Community

Emmy Award-winning documentarian explores hidden stories of Korean adoptees

Deann Borshay Liem spent much of her childhood believing she was an orphan. Adopted from Korea to the United States in 1966, Liem discovered in the early 1980s that her birth mother and siblings were alive. She also learned that her identity had been switched with another child during the adoption process and that her adoption documents had been falsified. That discovery found its way into Liem's work as a documentary filmmaker, through which she explored her own past and the broader history of Korea's overseas adoptions. "Trying to understand the truth about my adoption was part of the motivation for making my first film 'First Person Plural'," Liem said in a recent email interview with The Korea Times. Released in 2000, the documentary followed her search for and reunion with her Korean family. In 2010, she made "In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee," which traced the identity of the girl whose name had been substituted for hers. "These two films were intimate first-person explorations of my adoption and a means to recuperate my personal history and identity," she said. Her work also extended b

Oct 7, 2026By Lee Hyo-jin

Emmy Award-winning documentarian explores hidden stories of Korean adoptees

Banking & Finance

Bank hacking spree raises stakes for upcoming CEO reshuffle

A recent wave of cyberattacks on local banks is raising the stakes for an upcoming CEO reshuffle, with the heads of the country's five major lenders all set to see their terms expire at the end of the year, industry officials said Tuesday. The incidents, some of which involved artificial intelligence (AI), are expected to put banks' cybersecurity measures under greater scrutiny during this month's parliamentary audit and weigh on decisions over whether to reappoint incumbent chiefs. Rep. Park Sang-hyuk, a ruling Democratic Party of Korea lawmaker and secretary of the National Assembly's National Policy Committee, said he would seek to summon the heads of the five major commercial banks — KB Kookmin, Shinhan, Hana, Woori and NH NongHyup — as witnesses to determine the causes of repeated data leaks. The deadline for selecting witnesses for the Financial Services Commission audit on Thursday has already passed, making it more likely that bank CEOs could be called during the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) audit on Oct. 17 or the committee's final audit session on Oct. 22. In particu

Oct 6, 2026By Lee Hyo-jin

Bank hacking spree raises stakes for upcoming CEO reshuffle

Health

ADHD drug prescriptions surge 38% in 2 years

Prescriptions for methylphenidate, an attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) treatment widely known as "study drug" among students in Korea, have surged nearly 38 percent over the past two years in the country and are especially high among people aged 19 and under, data showed Sunday. According to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety and the Korea Institute of Drug Safety and Risk Management, 58.05 million methylphenidate tablets were prescribed in the first half of this year, up 12.1 percent from the same period a year earlier. This marked a 37.8 percent increase from the first half of 2024, when 42.13 million tablets were prescribed. Methylphenidate is a controlled medical substance in Korea and needs a doctor's prescription to be purchased. Alarming is that methylphenidate prescriptions were particularly high among people aged 19 and under, who accounted for about half of the total. In the first half of this year, 28.81 million tablets were prescribed to people in the age group. Males accounted for 20.9 million tablets, far more than the 7.91 million prescribed to females. Pres

Oct 4, 2026By Lee Hyo-jin

ADHD drug prescriptions surge 38% in 2 years

Economy

Lee orders thorough probe into data breaches at local banks

President Lee Jae Myung on Sunday ordered a thorough investigation into a string of recent data breaches at financial institutions, as artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cyberattacks increasingly target them. According to Cheong Wa Dae, Lee was briefed on recent data breaches at financial and public institutions and their responses to the incidents. "The president ordered officials to conduct a thorough investigation and make every effort to devise measures, with a grave awareness of the seriousness of the matter," presidential spokesperson Kang Yu-jung said. The remarks came after a series of data breaches at major financial firms over the past several days. Shinhan Bank on Thursday reported a breach affecting about 25,000 customers, followed by similar incidents reported at KB Kookmin Bank, Hana Bank and BNK Busan Bank on Friday. The leaked information included customers' names and phone numbers, as well as annual income and loan limits. Some customers' resident registration numbers were also exposed. The breaches have since spread beyond major banks to nonbank financial institutions.

Oct 4, 2026By Lee Hyo-jin

Lee orders thorough probe into data breaches at local banks

Banking & Finance

Shinhan, Kookmin, Hana data breaches fuel concerns over AI-powered cyberattacks in financial sector

A series of data breaches at Shinhan Bank, KB Kookmin Bank and Hana Bank, three of Korea’s largest commercial banks, has heightened concerns in the financial sector over increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks using artificial intelligence (AI). Unlike conventional attacks on banks’ core IT networks, the recent incidents involved repeated attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in systems used by employees or for sales support. This pattern has raised suspicions that the attacks were automated using AI. On Friday, KB Kookmin Bank said that personal information belonging to 119 customers was leaked after abnormal external access to a mobile system used by employees. The leaked information varied by customer and included names, phone numbers, addresses and resident registration numbers in encrypted format. "We have activated an emergency response system across the company, including a thorough review of all our processes to prevent further damage and recurrence," a Kookmin Bank official said. Later that day, Hana Bank said personal information belonging to 89 customers had been exposed fol

Oct 2, 2026By Lee Hyo-jin

Lee Hyo-jin

Read more

Shinhan becomes 1st Korean financial group to establish holding company in Indonesia

Early rate hike ahead of Fed's move minimized economic costs: BOK chief

Less paperwork, AI-powered banking: KakaoBank joins race for foreign customers

Korea intensifies efforts to track hackers behind bank cyberattacks

EXPLAINER How AI emerged as new threat in Korea's bank hacking crisis

Emmy Award-winning documentarian explores hidden stories of Korean adoptees

Bank hacking spree raises stakes for upcoming CEO reshuffle

ADHD drug prescriptions surge 38% in 2 years

Lee orders thorough probe into data breaches at local banks

Shinhan, Kookmin, Hana data breaches fuel concerns over AI-powered cyberattacks in financial sector

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