Company
Woori Bank is a major South Korean commercial bank offering retail and corporate banking, including mortgages, deposits, and loans.
Gyeonggi Province apartment prices rose 0.26% in the week to October 12 against 0.16% in Seoul, the Korea Real Estate Board reported. Record trades in Gunpo and Byeongjeom suggest spillover from Samsung-area districts, but Bundang posted the biggest weekly gain.
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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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Korea's won weakened 0.75% to 1,345.1 per dollar on a day foreign investors sold more than 4.5 trillion won of Kospi shares in a 5.46% fall. Exporters' dollar sales blunted the demand for dollars, Korea JoongAng Daily reported, so a short-won hedge recovered little of the equity loss.
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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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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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President Lee Jae Myung says AI appears to have been used in hacks on South Korean banks that leaked data on at least 25,000 Shinhan customers. If his claim that AI removes the need for specialized skills holds up, banks should plan for many more attackers.
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Seoul apartment prices rose 0.12% in October's first week, an 87th straight weekly gain, Korea Real Estate Board data show. Part of the pickup came from Gangnam's tax-driven slide easing, so the streak rests on that district as well as on Samsung-funded buying south of Seoul.
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Naver and Brookfield are negotiating up to $9 billion of financing for a $10 billion expansion of Naver's Sejong AI data center to 200 megawatts. Korean banks weighing a share have to judge what about 100,000 Nvidia GPUs will be worth years into a loan.
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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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President Lee Jae Myung ordered resources onto a breach of customer data at seven Korean financial firms, citing possible AI use in some attacks. What the firms pay will turn on a network law amended five days earlier and on which ministry runs the case.
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Victims of breaches at seven Korean lenders, Shinhan Bank among them, are recruiting members for class-action damages suits. With suspects in earlier Korean data cases still uncaught, the lenders look like the only parties those suits can reach.
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Korea's Financial Services Commission is due on the 7th to name about 15 more financial firms exempt from network separation rules, after a first round of 10. Network separation rules are what stop lenders running AI security tools, so the list decides who can use AI against AI-driven hacking.
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Woori Bank says it is the first Korean commercial bank to hedge a UK client's swap on its own London book, with a 70 million pound trade. It shows Woori can now carry UK rate risk in London, though winning that business on price will take repeat deals.
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Korean regulators sent security orders to about 500 financial firms after the same attacker IP turned up in breaches at seven lenders. Almost every firm doing the emergency reviews has no reported breach, so the cost is shared across the sector.
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Rep. Park Sung-hoon wants authorities to examine how 52 South Korean minors came to hold over 1 billion won in bank deposits, up from 42 seven months earlier. The rise is ten children in a tally that can count one child twice, while billion-won accounts hold about 0.7% of minors' 9.74 trillion won.
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XRP Asia, backed by Ripple and the XRP Ledger Foundation, launched in Singapore on Oct. 3 to connect Asia-Pacific XRPL builders with grants and partners. The grants it points to are Ripple's older programs, and the best documented of them offered up to $200,000 per Japanese project starting in June 2025.
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Korea's Financial Services Commission ordered a sector-wide security review after suspected AI-agent hackers hit the country's five largest banks. The three biggest leaks ran through employee, sales and broker tools, so the review's cost lands on systems customers never see.
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South Korea's Financial Services Commission ordered banks and card firms to check every externally reachable IT system after data leaks at four banks. The regulator will collect the returns and use them to build new cybersecurity measures for the financial sector.
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MoonPay is pursuing stablecoin, remittance and payments work with KB Financial, Woori Bank and KakaoBank after opening a Korean entity in September. Its one-vendor pitch faces three other global entrants and four Korean firms, most of them selling banks a single layer of the stack.
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Seoul apartment prices rose 0.09% in the week to Sept. 28, a record 86th straight weekly gain, at a third of late August's pace. Gangnam District fell 0.56%, the steepest of its last six weekly declines, so districts outside Gangnam now carry the citywide gain.
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