FSC cuts Tongyang Life Insurance's fine to W7b from W140b

Tongyang Life Insurance has been fined 7 billion won ($5.22 million) by financial regulators over a violation of the Credit Information Act.

Industry sources said Thursday that the Financial Services Commission finalized the sanctions against the insurer at its regular meeting Wednesday.

Tongyang Life Insurance is accused of providing customers' personal credit information to its affiliated general insurance agency in 2022 without obtaining their consent.

The Financial Supervisory Service had deemed the case an unauthorized transfer of information to a third party and proposed a fine of around 140 billion won to the FSC.

The FSC, however, determined that Tongyang Life Insurance's transfer of personal credit information to its affiliated agency differed from a typical illegal third-party disclosure, characterizing it instead as a routine business outsourcing arrangement.

The commission also cited the relatively limited scale of the information exposure compared with similar past cases as grounds for the reduction.

The FSC further noted that, unlike the Personal Information Protection Act or the Financial Consumer Protection Act, the current Credit Information Act leaves little room for reducing penalties in relatively minor cases.

Cases in which the FSC scales back sanctions proposed by the Financial Supervisory Service have become more frequent of late. In the case of Hong Kong H-index equity-linked securities, the Financial Supervisory Service had determined that banks should face fines in the 1.4 trillion won range. But the FSC requested further review and lowered the figure to around 600 billion won.

In the case of Lotte Card, which suffered a hacking incident, the FSC reduced an initially proposed 4.5-month business suspension to 1.5 months.