Financial Services Commission "Promoting Rationalization of Investor Suitability Assessment Related to the Financial Consumer Protection Act"

Notice of Administrative Guidance on the Operation Guidelines for the Investor Suitability Assessment System

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Jin-ho] Financial authorities have decided to streamline the 'Investor Risk Profile Assessment' to alleviate consumer inconveniences arising from the introduction of the Financial Consumer Protection Act (FCPA). They aim to reduce consumer discomfort through improvements in sales practices related to these inconvenience cases.

On the 2nd, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) announced an administrative guidance draft titled 'Investor Suitability Assessment System Operation Guidelines.' According to financial regulatory operation rules, the administrative guidance will be announced for 20 days from the 3rd to the 22nd, after which it will be submitted to the Financial Administrative Guidance Deliberation Committee.

First, the plan is to streamline the investor risk profile assessment. This assessment is conducted to comply with the suitability principle, one of the six major sales principles for financial investment products stipulated in the FCPA.

However, after the FCPA came into effect, consumers faced the inconvenience of having to undergo the investor risk profile assessment again in person at a branch, even if they had already completed it remotely. Additionally, due to daily limits on the number of assessments, consumers who made errors or mistakes in their responses often could not correct them.

In response, the FSC decided to streamline the assessment to shorten offline transaction times and improve consumer inconveniences caused by the current practice of allowing only one assessment per day.

Regarding the use of remote assessment results during face-to-face transactions, if a consumer visiting a branch has already completed a remote assessment and there have been no changes in the assessment criteria, the procedure has been simplified to only verify whether there are any changes in the consumer's information without requiring an additional assessment.

Furthermore, for face-to-face transactions, it is generally not allowed to change consumer information such as financial product understanding, which typically does not change within a short period and is difficult to objectively verify on the same day. However, changes due to objectively verifiable consumer factual errors or mistakes are recommended to be allowed upon consumer request.

For remote transactions, considering the difficulty for sellers to control consumer reassessments, the number of reassessments is limited to a maximum of three times per day.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.