Lee Seok-yong, President of NongHyup Bank, "Let's Make a Bank Customers Seek First"

Lee Seok-yong, President of NongHyup Bank, announced in his New Year's address on the 8th that the bank will prioritize customer trust to become an "attractive bank that customers seek first."

President Lee stated that despite the rapid changes in the financial environment last year, the bank achieved valuable results such as obtaining the highest international credit rating in the banking sector and fulfilling its role as a profit center for the entire NongHyup group. He said, "This would have been impossible without the passion and dedication of all employees." He further diagnosed that this year, due to the tightening of major countries' currencies and the accumulation of geopolitical tensions, concerns about economic recession are high, and the domestic economy is also expected to experience low growth due to household debt burdens and reduced consumption.

As key tasks for this year, President Lee emphasized the need to first establish an ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) management system for sustainable growth and strengthen proactive risk management. He described ESG management as a timely challenge and said, "We must actively integrate ESG throughout management by launching new ESG-specialized products and discovering new business models."

He also urged adaptation to changes through the establishment of a digital financial ecosystem. To this end, four tasks will be pursued: advancing NH All One Bank into a super platform, enhancing data utilization, innovating business processes, and internalizing core digital technologies.

Strengthening corporate finance competitiveness by expanding new main corporate clients in prime borrowers and promising sectors was also identified as a key task. Lastly, he said, "To break away from existing inertia and redesign from the ground up, we conducted a Future Competitiveness Enhancement Task Force (TF) over five months in the second half of last year," adding, "This will be reflected in this year's organizational restructuring and management plans."

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