South Korea's financial authorities have begun overhauling the private debt collection market after President Lee Jae-myung publicly criticised practices in collecting long-overdue debt. The plan would shift the business of buying and collecting non-performing loans to a licensing system, limit eligible operators to firms majority-owned by financial companies and raise minimum capital requirements. Regulators say the current market structure fuels long-term and excessive collection and is difficult to supervise effectively.

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) unveiled a mid- to long-term strategy to respond to the era of physical artificial intelligence, where AI combines with real-world environments to make decisions and act. At its 50th anniversary forum in Seoul, ETRI named robot intelligence as a priority area and said it would strengthen related research. It also outlined plans spanning flexible robot intelligence based on Meta RFM, an autonomous-growth ecosystem and sovereign robot data.