Hana Financial Group, one of South Korea’s top five financial groups, is considering mergers and acquisitions in non-banking sectors in a bid to seize new growth opportunities, said its chief on Thursday.
“We are reviewing M&As in non-banking sectors to explore new growth drivers,” Hana Financial Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ham Young-joo said at the sidelines of this year’s CEO Summer Forum hosted by the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI), Korea’s top business lobby group.
“While reinforcing our core businesses, we will unearth new businesses through partnerships and M&As.”
Hana Financial has been partnering with Korea’s information tech giant Naver Corp. and Kakao Corp. to discover new businesses while seeking to set up an exchange platform to trade securities token offerings, Ham added.
He expected that good investment opportunities would spring up “in the fintech sector and Big Tech companies” despite toughening regulations.
Hana Financial Group has formed an artificial intelligence council with SK Group for various joint projects in the AI sector. Last year, the financial group launched the so-called AI Startup Lab with SK to provide AI startups with an accelerator program.
The two groups also joined hands to develop a next-generation credit rating model, utilizing their compiled telecommunications and financial data.
INNOVATOR IN THE KOREAN FINANCIAL INDUSTRY
Hana Financial Group has been on the frontline of innovating the financial industry. It enabled 24-hour foreign exchange trading for the first time in the Korean financial market in 2022.
Last month, its flagship retail banking unit Hana Bank became the country’s first commercial lender offering an inheritance management service, a one-stop service encompassing post-retirement asset management and inheritance.
Hana Financial has been actively seeking to foster non-banking businesses under the direction of Chairman Ham, who was promoted to the current position in 2022. Ham had also served as the chief executive officer of Hana Bank since 2015 until his inauguration as the group CEO.
Since Ham’s appointment to the group’s chairmanship, Hana Financial Group’s financial performance has improved, with its cost-to-income ratio (CIR) dropping to 38.7% in 2023 from over 50% in 2022. The lower a bank’s CIR, the more efficiently a bank operates.
Last year, Hana Financial Group reported 3.45 trillion won ($2.5 billion) in net profit, a 3.3% dip from the prior year mainly because massive losses in its brokerage arm’s overseas real estate investments more than offset the flagship banking unit’s record profit of 3.48 trillion won driven by a surge in non-interest income.
Write to Eui-Myung Park at uimyung@hankyung.com
Sookyung Seo edited this article.