Woori Financial Group will invest a total of 80 trillion won over five years to shift to productive finance and expand inclusive finance. It will create the government-led National Growth Fund and its own group co-investment funds to invest 73 trillion won in 10 cutting-edge strategic industries including artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductors. The remaining 7 trillion won will be used to support vulnerable groups and small business owners.
Yim Jong-ryong, chairman of Woori Financial Group, held the "Woori Financial future co-growth project joint chief executive officer (CEO) briefing" on the 29th. CEOs of seven group affiliates attended the briefing.
Yim personally announced the implementation plan over about 40 minutes. He said, "Behind the criticism of interest business lies criticism of the focus on real estate finance," adding, "We humbly accept such criticism and seek a new path."
The project consists of a 73 trillion won plan to promote productive finance and a 7 trillion won plan to promote inclusive finance. Of the 73 trillion won for productive finance, 10 trillion won will go to contributions to the National Growth Fund, 7 trillion won to investments in the group co-investment fund, and the remaining 56 trillion won to loans.
The 7 trillion won for inclusive finance will be used to expand the supply of loans for low-income households. It will also move forward with government-linked programs, including financial support for small business owners such as 48 billion won in guaranteed loans, and support for a bad bank totaling 100 billion won,
It also focused on lowering interest rates to ease the interest burden on vulnerable groups. Woori Bank will apply a preferential rate of 0.3 percentage points to low-credit borrowers with an external credit rating (CB) of grade 7 or lower. In addition, among existing diligent repayment customers, those with the bank's own credit rating (CSS) of grades 4–7 will see rates lowered by 0.4 percentage points, and grade 8 by 1.5 percentage points.
To strengthen execution of this project, Woori Financial plans to newly introduce a scoring weight of up to 30% for productive and inclusive finance in evaluating the performance of its subsidiaries.
Through this, Woori Financial expected the share of corporate loans, currently at 50%, to expand to 60%. A Woori Financial representative said, "Inclusive finance stood at about 5 trillion won over the past five years, but going forward it will increase by about 40% to 7 trillion won, and a total of 550,000 small business owners and vulnerable people are expected to receive direct benefits." It also expressed the expectation that Woori Financial's social responsibility will be further strengthened.