"Stop Meaningless Copying and Handwriting"... Financial Supervisory Service Pushes to Streamline Investment Product Subscription Procedures

[Financial News] Starting as early as next year, the paperwork required to sign up for financial products will be simplified. The time needed to sign up for new investment products, which currently takes about one hour, is expected to be cut substantially to as little as 30 minutes. The procedures for verifying investor information and the duty to explain products will also be streamlined. The existing formal requirement to copy out 163 characters will be reduced to 51 characters.
The Financial Supervisory Service announced on the 3rd that it is pursuing the “Measures to Rationalize Subscription Procedures to Shorten the Time Required to Sign Up for Investment Products.”
First, duplicate or unnecessary subscription documents will be consolidated or eliminated, reducing the current roughly 17 types to about 10. The number of physical signatures required to sign up for a product will also be cut from around 17 to three to six by minimizing repeated signatures within the same document.
Formal handwriting requirements will be removed decisively, with handwritten acknowledgments limited to essential words concerning key and important matters. A handwritten acknowledgment is a procedure in which customers write the relevant content by hand when signing up for an investment product so that they fully understand the investment risks. Currently, the handwriting requirement ranges from 78 to 125 characters when signing up for a bank’s specific money trust and from 107 to 301 characters when signing up for a public fund through a securities company.
Documents unnecessary for concluding a contract will be abolished. Efficiency will be improved during the investor information verification stage by expanding the use of non-face-to-face channels. For example, investors may be allowed to complete in advance, through a non-face-to-face channel, an investor information verification form that does not require an in-person explanation, either before visiting a branch or while waiting for a consultation.
Once consumers meet a sales employee at a branch counter, they will immediately receive the results of the suitability assessment and proceed with follow-up procedures, such as opening an account. Document forms will also be revised so that product explanations focus on key and important matters. The measures are scheduled to be implemented by each company starting next year after industry-specific self-regulatory rules are revised, financial companies develop the necessary systems, and the changes are incorporated into their internal regulations.
A Financial Supervisory Service official said, "After revising industry-specific self-regulatory rules and completing financial companies’ system development and internal regulation procedures, we plan to implement the changes at each financial company starting in 2027. The Financial Supervisory Service will also continue identifying additional areas for improvement through mock subscription procedures to verify the time required to sign up for products under the revised measures."
[email protected] Park Moon-soo Reporter