Woori Bank said on Wednesday it will create a Financial Consumer Protection Committee within its board to establish financial consumer protection as a core management value.

The move was pushed to preemptively implement the Financial Supervisory Service's “best practices for financial consumer protection governance” announced in September last year and to embed consumer protection across management beyond regulatory compliance.

Woori Bank will set up the Financial Consumer Protection Committee on March 20 as a specialist subcommittee within its board. It will build a system under which the board reviews and manages key related policies and strategies. The committee will have at least 3 members, including a director specialising in consumer protection, and will meet regularly at least once every half year. It will review key matters including management strategies and policies and the enactment and revision of rules.

With the new committee, the bank plans to significantly strengthen internal management systems so that a consumer protection perspective is sufficiently reflected across the full process from financial product planning to post-management.

It will also introduce a programme to train specialist personnel to raise the level of financial consumer protection. The bank plans to develop training courses to respond to changes in relevant laws and policies, foster experts and spread a consumer-focused culture across the organisation.

It will also strengthen protection elements within its performance compensation system, or KPI, so consumer protection works in practice during product sales. To do so, it introduced a system under which the chief consumer protection officer, or CCO, exercises “exclusive prior consent rights” and “rights to demand improvements” over KPI design and other areas, enabling thorough checks in advance.

Yoon Seok-in (윤석인), a deputy general manager in Woori Bank's consumer protection department, said the move aims to embed consumer protection as a core management value. He said the bank will establish a consumer-focused financial culture that works in practice across the full process from product planning to post-management.