South Korea’s top financial regulator is seeking to ease regulations to allow operations of more specialized banks such as K-bank and Kakao Bank - the country’s two Internet-only banks that launched services last year.

Choi Jong-ku, chairman of the Financial Services Commission (FSC), unveiled such plan at a conference on Monday at Yonsei University in northern Seoul, along with other measures to ease licensing regulations in the financial industry.

Under the plan, the FSC will establish an institutional groundwork to allow operations of more specialized banks by breaking down licensing criteria and measures. The regulator plans to approve operations of customized banks according to their duties and roles. An unnamed FSC official said that “details are yet to come.”

Meanwhile, the FSC also unveiled plans to ease licensing regulations in other sectors such as insurance and securities to allow operations of more customized and specialized services.

In the insurance sector, the FSC plans to allow more daily life-based, small-sized specialized insurance companies to offer services online. As part of efforts to attract more participation, the regulator plans to ease minimum fund requirement needed to set up an online-only insurance company to allow sales of insurance products at online shopping malls. It is also considering introducing an overall system that allows small-sized insurers that run on a short-term basis to offer specialized services such as pet and travel insurances as they are less vulnerable to risks and are cheaper than conventional insurance products. The FSC will also ease regulations to allow more special insurers to operate in life, pension, casualty, liability, nursing, and re-insurance sectors that have been banned from making new entries.

In the brokerage sector, the FSC will push for more small-sized, specialized firms to be set up by lowering minimum capital requirements. The regulator will ease barriers to allow more specialized brokerages engaged in private equity and services in the secondary Kosdaq and smaller, venture-focused Konex markets by allowing them to simply register for operations instead of applying for approval. It also plans to lower capital requirement by half from 3 billion won ($2.8 million) to 1.5 billion won.

By Kim Tae-sung and Lee Eun-joo

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