President Kim Joo-hyun of Korea Deposit Insurance Corp. delivers his congratulatory speech at the company’s 

17th founding anniversary on June 3 at the company’s head office in Seoul.(photo courtesy of KDIC).

   Korea Deposit Insurance Corp. held its 17th anniversary ceremony on June 3 at its head office in Seoul with all of its top executives and staff attending the ceremony, the company said recently.

President Kim Joo-hyun, in his congratulatory address at the ceremony, said the company had done a great job in overcoming the 2008 global financial crisis and the defaults of a number of savings banks that occurred since 2011. As a result of the company’s successful actions, it won recognition for the significance of its value from the people and high respect for its operation from such global financial organizations as the IADI and the IMF, especially in the areas of crisis management and professional capacities of its manpower, who worked hard to ward off the global financial crises from impacting Korea’s financial institutions, the president recalled.

President Kim said, “All of those achievements have been due to the hard work by our seniors who have moved on from our company and all officers and staff, their passion for hard work and strong sense of mission.” He said he wanted to take the ceremony as an opportunity to thank everyone present for their magnificent efforts as well as the labor union members and the head of the union for their cooperation.

“Despite the poor global economic conditions due to the sluggish recovery, the European financial crisis and monetary quantitative easing by a number of advanced nations, the outcome of which is not certain, we have been able to come up with a new vision entitled, ‘The New Future for Financial Stability and the Top Deposit Insurance Corp.,’ which is in tune with the strong finance advocated by the new government led by President Park Geun-hye,” Kim said.

Kim said the core of the company’s business is taking care of defaulted assets of financial institutions and the KDIC has been engaged in various work including the clearing of many financial systems in the process of taking care of these defaulted assets. “We won a lot of high praise for our work on restructuring both at home and abroad, which has been the result of the company’s painful efforts to reform the systems, not relying on past systems and practices,” the president said.

Internationally, the financial institutions have been engaged in discussing ways to reform the area of taking care of defaulted financial assets to make it faster and more effective. 

“The KDIC should take the lead in these movements, taking advantage of our past experiences for restructuring and our present systems. We can do it with our own experiences and manpower and only such efforts of ours can make the KDIC a first-rate deposit insurance firm by further developing and strengthen its image in the realm of the financial safety net,” Kim said.

“The next task for us to take care are the measures to prevent financial defaults from occurring. Looking at how we took care of the defaulted assets of savings banks, its scale in particular, we could see the importance of the measures to prevent such cases from happening. The KDIC got exclusive rights to investigate the problems, which is a symbol of high trust given to us by the government as well as the people, and also significant at the same time for stability of the financial industry in Korea.

“The KDIC should make efforts to come up with preventive measures against financial defaults before they break out as we look back at our experiences of handling defaulted assets, especially the scale of funds used.

“We also have to do a good job of closing the cases we have been in charge of. Recently, the privatization of Woori Bank and its affiliates have become a major issue in the financial community, as the matter has not yet been taken care of until now. The KDIC has to take care of the details of the deal, although the government and the Public Asset Committee set the direction of the project. The KDIC should do its best to see that the deal has an excellent finish from the viewpoint of the legal, administrative and political sides,” the president concluded.