TITLE: South Korea's Financial Supervisory Service Announces Capital Market Improvement Plan
BODY:
On March 18, 2026, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) announced a comprehensive capital market improvement plan focused on strengthening market resilience and restoring public confidence in South Korea's capital markets.
The FSS is implementing a four-pillar policy framework centred on trust, shareholder protection, innovation, and market accessibility. Under the trust pillar, the FSS will intensify efforts to eliminate stock price manipulation and accounting fraud, while accelerating the market exit of underperforming companies. The shareholder protection pillar includes stricter review procedures to prohibit duplicate listings in principle, prevent shareholder rights violations through low share price neglect, and strengthen stewardship code implementation. The innovation pillar aims to restructure market mechanisms to support stage-appropriate funding for innovative enterprises. The market accessibility pillar seeks to promote domestic and long-term investment through rapid launch of new products and implementation of MSCI roadmap follow-up measures to encourage foreign investment.
In the short term, the FSS is deploying a 100 trillion won-plus market stabilisation programme to respond to external shocks. Concurrent measures include concentrated monitoring and zero-tolerance enforcement against fake news dissemination and market manipulation, rigorous management of leverage investment risk factors, and preparation of stress tests and contingency plans. The FSS convened a capital market stabilisation and normalisation roundtable discussion involving investors, enterprises, market experts, government, and relevant agencies, divided into two sessions addressing market crisis resilience and building public trust in Korean markets.
The plan aligns with national policy objective 47 on capital market innovation toward Korea Premium.