Lately Korean banking industry’s profits are deteriorating because of the unstable financial environment and tough competition. High non-operating income, decrease of allowance for dad debts, low non-interest profits are the keynote of the recent th...
Lately Korean banking industry’s profits are deteriorating because of the unstable financial environment and tough competition. High non-operating income, decrease of allowance for dad debts, low non-interest profits are the keynote of the recent three years operational returns. Therefore Korean banks have to penetrate into new market or expand customer base. Especially regional banks are based on local community so they have some problems to effect economies of scale due to the small business size. So they need to expand customer base and adhere to a regionalism. In this background, this study has intention to examine the feasibility for regional banks to penetrate into micro finanace as an alternative way to expand customer base.
First, this study explain the development progress of micro finanace and then analyze the present status of banking industry’s profit construction. In the main subject, this study introduce various successful cases of Micro Finance Institutions such as Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, ACCION in America and so on. The next, this study shows several common factors to explain the success.
ACCION and Grameen Bank which are praised as the most successful micro credit programs execute the education beforehand for the target of loan. And they lay stress on the specialty related to the success of enterprise, but Korea does not. Both ACCION and Grameen Bank allow to stand a joint surety so they emphasize social responsibility of the micro credit borrowers. But in Korea a guarantor and guarantee are the definite factors of loan. ACCION and Grameen Bank prepare incentive functions through combination between the form of an additional loan and repayment. In the aspect of supervision, ACCION and Grameen Bank have a system to check the rate of repayment and to support post management rapidly.
Based on the result of this study, the suggestion for regional bank’s micro credit program follows as this:
Foreign successful examples certify that micro credit can make a profit. Moreover corporate social responsibilities are getting more and more important. For regional banks, they have to emphasize on regional public good and regionalism to survive. In these points, they had better to introduce micro credit. The proper method of introduce is to consign retail banking program to micro finance institution or to organize an independent subsidiary company. The target would be those who have some business experience and will of self-support. The interest rate will be higher than 20% due to the risk premium and fixed costs. In the aspect of supervision, they had better to adopt short-term repayment schedule to check the rate of repayment. They also need to construct the system to support the preliminary education and post management like ACCION and Grameen Bank. I expect that micro credit is one of the most effective way for regional banks to survive tough competition in financial market.