Lee Eog-weon, Chairperson of the Financial Services Commission (FSC), said on the 20th that the recent customer data leak at card companies shows a complacent attitude toward consumer protection in the card sector and that a soul-searching effort is needed to prevent a recurrence.
The Chairperson attended a "meeting with chief executive officers (CEOs) of the specialized credit finance sector" held at the Credit Finance Association in Jung-gu, Seoul, that day and stated accordingly, saying card companies serve as payment infrastructure consolidating merchants and cardholders and must recognize both merchants and cardholders as consumers.
The Chairperson noted that the spread of complex payment and settlement structures through the multi-level payment gateway (PG) framework is the result of the card industry neglecting consumer protection. The Chairperson said card companies focused on reducing merchant management expense and easily securing sales outlets while neglecting consumer protection, and that data leak incidents will be strictly sanctioned and that the authorities plan to prepare institutional improvement measures related to card payments through PGs, including eliminating regulatory arbitrage between prepaid/debit electronic payment instrument payments and card payments.
To the capital industry, the Chairperson said that rather than easily securing interest revenue, if new business ideas are proposed from the perspective of enhancing the productivity of corporations and improving public convenience, the authorities will actively review various regulatory improvements, including limits on handling rental businesses.
Regarding the new technology finance industry, the Chairperson said efforts are also needed to more robustly protect investors and investee corporations in order to improve the system, including introducing new investment methods, and urged that, so founders can learn from failure and try again, at least early-stage startups should not be subjected to excessive joint and several liability.
The card industry proposed raising the minimum age for issuing debit cards to minors and increasing the postpaid transit card usage limit. The capital industry asked to allow new ancillary businesses such as insurance agency and telemarketing, while the new technology finance industry called for institutional improvements to expand the provision of venture capital to venture corporations.