SEOUL: South Korea’s Busan Bank has registered with the Directorate of Investment and Company Administration (DICA) to open a representative office in Myanmar, through DICA’s one-stop-shop service, according to the regulator’s website.
Busan Bank, a subsidiary of Korean holding company BNK Financial Group, will join a number of other South Korean financial institutions in opening a Yangon office, according to information from the Central Bank of Myanmar.
The central bank lists Hana Bank, The Export-Import Bank of Korea, Industrial Bank of Korea, Kookmin Bank, Korea Development Bank, Shinhan Bank and Woori Bank among those that have opened representative offices in the country.
Three of these banks – Industrial Bank of Korea, Kookmin Bank and Shinhan Bank – applied for branch licences last year in a bidding round for foreign banks. Notably absent from the process were major Korean institutions Hana Bank and Woori Bank.
The Central Bank of Myanmar received 25 Request for Proposal (RFP) applications from international banks with Myanmar representative offices by its deadline last July and announced nine winners in October, none of which was from South Korea.
The winning banks – ANZ from Australia, three Japanese banks – The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and Mizuho Bank, Thailand’s Bangkok Bank Public Company, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Malayan Banking Berhad (Maybank), and Singaporean lenders United Overseas Bank (UOB) and Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp (OCBC) are all expected to have opened branches by the end of this year.
