President Ji Sung-kyu of KEB Hana Bank.(Photo: KEB Hana)

KEB Hana Bank saw its overseas profit jump substantially in recent months along with the progress of digitalization, with loans outstanding as of May 31 rising to $16.587,80 billion, up 9 percent from $15.256,3 billion recorded at the end of last year, the bank said on June 25.

Officials of the bank said the figures show that the bank has been immensely successful in its investment bank activities, securing the likes of syndication loans and project financing related to airplane transactions.

Since the setup of a unit in charge of global IB, they said the bank has been able to turn to non-interest earnings to share a greater increase from the interest income in its earnings make up, explaining the bank’s vast increase in earnings so far this year.

The bank handled five large project financing cases, led by financing for a project to build the Silver Town Tunnel on the Thames River, flowing thru the center of London, as well as airplane financing projects, such as the sale of airplanes by ICBC Airplane Leasing Co., which is considered a huge deal in the aircraft financing sector.

The bank’s overseas IB sector profit jumped 30.2 percent YoY, amounting to 50.1 billion won. President Ji Sung-kyu, a global financing expert who assumed the top job at the bank in March, has been given credit for the bank’s enormous strides in non-interest income.

President Ji promised in his inaugural speech on March 21 that he will aim to make KEB Hana Bank a leader with a customer-centered operation and competitiveness in the digital area, coping with the changes and reform demanded by the new age.

Ji has been known as a global banking expert as he spent half of the 30-odd years of his banking career overseas, having been assigned to the bank’s Hong Kong branch in 2001. He was working at the bank’s international dep’t foreign exchange sector at the time. He then was reassigned to the Shenyang branch in China in 2003. He sworked for a number of branches in China, winning a reputation as a global banking expert among his peers.

In 2006, he was assigned to the bank’s local subsidiary. He learned how to speak the Mandarine during his time in Beijing. He already spoke a number of languages fluently, including Japanese, Vietnamese and English, and now Chinese.

In 2014, to cap it all off, he was named to head Hana Bank’s local subsidiary in China and led the merger of Korea Exchange Bank’s local subsidiary in China with that of KEB Hana Bank now that Hana Bank took over KEB. One of his achievements while heading the bank’s Chinese subsidiary was hiring Chinese officials to head the subsidiary’s 12 branches across China.

President Ji targets boosting the overseas profit share around 40 percent of the bank’s total profit by 2025 under the Global 2540 Project that he set up to be run by the Global Digital Strategy Council staffed by the members of the Digital Avengers Team, which was also set up at Ji’s suggestion.

Ji always felt that it was a duty of the top manager to create an environment inside the bank to have its employees to fully show off their capacities for work which will lead to the bank’s fantastic growth.

He also believed in hiring talented employees for any business firm, pledging to hire 1,200 digital experts and to train 2,000 global financial experts while he is in charge of the bank’s top management, which, he thinks could decide success or failure of the bank in the days ahead.