Shinhan Bank vowed to diversify services for expat residents in its efforts to offer expat-specialized services in its domestic branches.

Bank chief executive Cho Yong-byoung has called for Shinhan’s “glocalization,” a term for globalization achieved by localization, since his inauguration in March. Cho has emphasized that suiting the needs of foreign businesses operating in Korea is a crucial step in glocalization.

Since August 2011, Shinhan Bank has offered a foreigners-only banking unit for foreign-invested firms operating here. Upon collecting data on foreign demand in the domestic financial market, Shinhan currently runs 80 branches for foreign-invested corporate clientele.

As of late September, Shinhan’s new signups of foreign-invested corporate clients have more than doubled over last year. In the same period, the market share of foreign-invested corporate clients increased to 20 percent, a far cry from last year’s 8 percent.

The banking technology has been most thriving in individual banking for expats. Shinhan has positioned employees who are fluent in foreign languages at 40 branches in districts frequented by expats.

For ATMs with foreign wire functions, the Korean lender plans to expand the foreign language support from the existing eight languages to 10, including Southeast Asian tongues.

Shinhan has developed banking services for expat customers that do not require bank visits, already in operation.

Now the bank seeks to broaden foreign customers’ access to Shinhan’s online banking services. It launched an English version of ezPlus for Mac users and seeks to add three more languages -- Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese -- to the interface. Amid rising demand for smartphone banking, Shinhan is spurring tests and feedback from foreign expat customers in designing mobile banking contents as well.

By Chung Joo-won (joowonc@heraldcorp.com)