North Korea will soon open commercial bank, mobile banking

North Korea seems to be ready to establish its first commercial bank, Korea Development Bank (KDB) researcher Kim Young-hui told The Korea Times, Tuesday.
“I think it could happen in the near future, within a year at most,” said Kim, Senior Research Fellow at KDB’s Korean Peninsula New Economy Center.

Kim’s forecast is based on the latest edition of the North Korean quarterly journal Economic Research, issued in June, which was about establishing a mobile banking system for smartphone users. The contents of the quarterly were reported by Yonhap.

“A commercial bank should be established first to enable customers to use mobile banking services,” she said. “Once it is established, individuals will be able to make transactions through their smart phones through their own bank accounts.”

In North Korea, the concept of individuals opening a bank account is alien.

Most of North Korean residents deposit their money with individual money traders, making it hard for the North Korean regime to account for the money it prints, Kim said.

Although North Korea established the Commercial Bank Law in 2006, it still does not have a separate commercial bank regulatory system. There are some “commercial” banks, but they only deal with foreign currency, not domestic currency, Kim said.

The Commercial Bank Law enables loan services for individuals, while working with domestic currency as well as foreign currency.

North Korea under Kim Jong-un is now trying to open up to the global economy as he declared in November that the completion of nuclear weapon development left him with one mission of economic development in his Byeongjin policy.

The new smartphone-based financial service would enable North Korean residents to check (their) bank accounts, withdraw cash, transfer money as well as pay at shops. The tool is a smartphone, an “indispensable information communication tools.”

The report also urged the mobile telecommunication organizations in the country to establish a communication infrastructure that can provide information on the purchase of goods while notifying financial transactions to mobile banking users. The infrastructure, once established, will also enable confirming of payments and settlements to both buyers and sellers.

“Unlike other countries where a series of steps have been taken before introducing mobile banking, North Korea is skipping them since smartphones are already prevalent in the country,” the researcher said.

The report also proposed the development and introduction of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and NFC (Near Field Communication) technologies as well as the installation of necessary devices to make payment using smart phones at stores and other facilities more quick and accurate.

It also pointed out the security and transparency of financial transactions should be secured through thorough security measures such as operating system forgery inspection, malicious code inspection and an intrusion detection system.

By Jung Da-min

(Korea Times)