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South Korea plans to tweak KYC and investor protection rules

The Financial Services Commission of South Korea wants the Government to amend the Enforcement Decree of the Act on Reporting and Use of Certain Financial Transaction Information in line with standards set forth by the Financial Action Task Force. It is also reportedly about to draw up a Bill for the purposes of protecting investors from sharp practice.
The amendments to the transaction reporting law, which the
regulator has already drafted up for parliamentary approval, seek
to add a few new 'know your customer' rules to the country's
anti-money-laundering regime. The regulator wants to expand the
meaning of the phrase "financial service provider" in the
Enforcement Decree to include any entity that the Commissioner of
the Korea Financial Intelligence Unit believes to be at risk of
being used by money launderers. Public enterprises and other
government-affiliated institutions are targets. The statutory
meaning of the phrase "one-off financial transaction" is to be
changed to refer to a transaction performed by a customer who has
not established a business relationship with a financial service
provider. One-off financial transactions are to be subdivided
into more specific types with newly established threshold amounts
for reporting. On this leg of the reforms, the public has until
26 June to send in comments.
Meanwhile, Yonhap reports that the financial regulator's vice
chairman, Kim Yong-beom, has told a public meeting that the South
Korean Government wants to draw up a Bill to allow consumers to
buy non-life insurance products without certain policy conditions
and to ask their banks to reactivate their dormant bank accounts
online. It also (whether with or without legislation is unknown)
wants to reorganise the FSC to help it (or, perhaps, to compel
it) to hold firms more accountable for harming customers. Kim
spoke against banks selling services and products to consumers on
the back of 'false information.'