CompanyGraph
Hana Financial Group Inc.
086790 · KRX · South Korea
Offers Korean customers banking, stock trading, and insurance through one relationship by holding all three government licences at once.
Hana Financial Group holds licences from South Korea's Financial Supervisory Service for banking, securities, and insurance simultaneously — a regulatory combination that lets a single Korean small business owner take out a won-denominated loan, trade on the Korea Exchange, and hold an insurance policy without ever leaving the same institution. Because all three products sit inside one relationship, data from a customer's credit history, trading activity, and insurance claims feeds back into decisions across all three books at once, which makes cross-selling cheaper than it would be for a bank that had to acquire each customer separately. The same FSS rules that make this possible also create the main internal constraint: each subsidiary must maintain its own capital adequacy ratio, so if the lending book runs into stress, capital sitting in the securities or insurance subsidiaries cannot be moved across to absorb the losses. If the FSS were to tighten the conglomerate reporting rules that allow the three licences to operate as a single customer-facing entity, the bundled model would legally break apart into three separate businesses, each of which would have to win back customers the others already hold.
How does this company make money?
The company earns the difference between what it pays depositors and what it charges borrowers on won-denominated loans. It collects commissions each time a customer trades on the Korea Exchange. It receives regular insurance premiums from life and property policyholders. It also earns a spread on foreign exchange conversions and the trade finance and international remittance services it provides to businesses moving money across borders.
What makes this company hard to replace?
A Korean SME that wants to leave has to move its loan, its cash management account, and its securities trading account to different FSS-regulated institutions separately — there is no single place to move everything at once. Korean retail customers have direct debits and investment accounts tied together, and splitting those up means re-establishing each one individually with a different provider. The friction is practical and administrative, not just emotional.
What limits this company?
Even though customers are shared across all three parts of the business, the FSS requires each part — banking, securities, and insurance — to hold its own separate pool of capital and meet its own adequacy rules. Capital cannot flow freely between them. So if the banking book runs into trouble, the insurance or securities side cannot step in to absorb the loss. The three businesses share customers but cannot share financial cushions.
What does this company depend on?
The company cannot operate without five things: Korean won liquidity from the Bank of Korea discount window, active banking and securities licences from the Financial Supervisory Service, live connectivity to the Korea Exchange for securities trading, Korean credit bureau data to assess loan applications, and SWIFT network access to move money across borders.
Who depends on this company?
Korean SME borrowers rely on it for won-denominated loans bundled with cash management — losing that relationship would mean finding separate providers for each service. Korean retail investors depend on it for securities trading linked directly to their bank accounts. Korean insurance policyholders depend on its insurance subsidiary to pay claims; if that subsidiary stopped operating, those payments would stop.
How does this company scale?
Adding more Korean retail customers or branches to the digital banking platform costs relatively little once the technology and compliance systems are in place. What does not scale easily is lending to Korean small businesses: assessing those borrowers requires local knowledge and face-to-face evaluation that cannot be automated or handed off, so growth in that segment stays slow and manual.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
When the US Federal Reserve raises interest rates, carry trade flows shift and domestic Korean liquidity conditions tighten, which directly affects the company's cost of funding. An aging Korean population means fewer savers and less loan demand over time. A slowdown in the Chinese economy hits Korea's export-dependent small businesses hard, which raises the risk that SME borrowers cannot repay their loans.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
If the FSS tightened or removed the rules that allow the three subsidiaries to operate as a single customer-facing entity — for example by introducing stricter ring-fencing that prevents bundled product distribution across banking, securities, and insurance — the company would legally become three separate businesses overnight. Each would then have to win back customers the others already hold, and the cross-sell revenue that makes the model work would disappear.