South Korea's push to make its markets global dogged by FX history

South Korea struggles to loosen currency restrictions to boost global financial markets, facing challenges from past crises and regulations.

As South Korea seeks to boost the global profile of its financial markets, the export powerhouse is struggling to loosen the tight currency restrictions that have for years been a major pain point for investors and traders in the country.

Asia’s fourth-largest economy is one of the world’s most advanced by many metrics but has been unable to shake its classification as an emerging market due to a host of issues, including the way its currency is managed.

While foreign exchange regulators are now considering modest steps to make the won more global, such as extending trading hours, memories of bruising foreign exchange crises cast a long shadow over reforms.

For many firms and market participants, South Korea’s arcane restrictions on cross-border transactions, daily reporting requirements and broker rules make doing business slow and costly.

“Having FX markets open almost all day around the clock will certainly help us to better plan currency conversions, and get a better deal,” said Bongju Kang, chief financial manager at a small plastic materials exporter. “Currently we negotiate the exchange rate with a local banker the moment we see a good quote, or sometimes hours in advance, especially when the size of the deal is big.”

The FX restrictions are among the factors often blamed for the so-called Korea Discount, the term given to the global underperformance of local stocks. Other issues include poor decision making and weak governance by major conglomerates.

Regulators say thorough FX market surveillance is still needed to prevent destabilising currency swings.