[South Korea] Financial watchdog to step up crackdown on Big Tech – Nation Thailand

As part of its annual plan for this year, the Financial Supervisory Service said it would prepare Korean-style Big Tech monitoring measures to stimulate competition and innovation from Big Techs foray into the finance sector and to achieve financial stability and customer protection.

The purpose of the measures is to establish systematic monitoring to enforce adoption of healthy market rules, and actively supporting financial innovation in the era of the big blur -- a locally-used term referring to the blurring of boundaries between industries.

The FSS announcement comes as tech giants Naver and Kakaos fast-growing online and mobile financial services have become serious competitors to traditional banks. It also comes amid concerns that regulations on Big Tech companies customer protection and data use related to their financial platforms remain unclear.

To bolster transparency in online and mobile finance, the FSS seeks to check on the current state of electronic finance transaction fees and build a related data and information disclosure system. The watchdog, concerned with the lack of standards in assessing environmental, social and governance-related financial products, vowed to come up with a solid yardstick for ESG bonds. It said it would review ESG-related disclosure systems and adopt stricter assessment process for ESG-related funds.

The FSS picked customer protection as another key task for this year, saying it plans to implement stricter regulations to prevent financial institutions exaggerated marketing and selling of risky products.

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[South Korea] Financial watchdog to step up crackdown on Big Tech - Nation Thailand