South Korea’s financial firms are pruning their workforces in the face of challenges such as deteriorating margins and bleak outlook for next year

November 24, 2013 Leave a comment

Financial firms slimming down

Kim Gyu-sik, Lee Duk-joo, Lee Yoo-sup

2013.11.22 16:45:58

South Korea’s financial firms are pruning their workforces in the face of challenges such as deteriorating margins and bleak outlook for next year. At a time when insurers, securities firms and credit card issuers have announced a series of job-cutting plans, foreign banks are trimming down in size through branch shut-downs.
Samsung Life Insurance, a top life insurer in South Korea, has embarked on pruning workforces under the name of “support for executives and employees transitioning to new career.” Samsung Life Insurance notified executives and employees on its board Friday that it will launch a program to help those who hope to start new business or new life to switch to new occupations.
The insurer underwent an early retirement scheme in 2011. The career transition support program is the first of its kind, which the industry views as a measure to all but encourage workers to retire.
Under the program, Samsung Life Insurance will support 70 to 100 applicants to open the insurer’s general agents, become professional educational lecturers, and work as consultants at telemarketing offices.
Other insurers such as Hanwha General Insurance are also slashing jobs. Hanwha is receiving early retirement applications from employees who have worked for over 10 years, from early November.
The country’s biggest card firm Shinhan Card plans to push for an early retirement scheme for the first time in three years since 2010. In the securities sector, struggling with transaction fee cuts, Samsung Securities and Hanwha Investment Securities have slashed workforces in the second half of this year. In the banking sector, foreign banks continue to slim down with HSBC Bank shutting down 10 branches and receiving honorary retirement applications from 210 workers.

Filed under Macro Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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