Investment Product Sign-Ups Could Shrink From an Hour to 30 or 40 Minutes With 17 Signatures Cut

Signing up for an investment product at a South Korean bank or brokerage can take about an hour, but regulators expect the process to shrink to 30 or 40 minutes from 2027.

The Financial Supervisory Service said it would remove duplicate paperwork and simplify repeated explanation and signature requirements for products such as trusts and funds. The number of forms customers complete will fall from about 17 to roughly 10.

Three documents will become the core paperwork: the transaction and account-opening application, the investor information form, and the contract or product application. Other documents will be treated as supplementary. Customers will generally sign the core documents once instead of signing each supplementary form separately.

The regulator also plans to replace signatures beside individual confirmation items with check marks, followed by one signature at the final stage. Required handwritten signatures will fall from about 17 to between three and six. The amount of product-risk language customers must copy by hand will also be reduced from about 163 characters to roughly 51, focusing on phrases such as “very high risk” and “possible total loss of principal.”

The Financial Supervisory Service said financial firms had increasingly focused on formally completing explanation duties to limit legal responsibility rather than helping customers understand products. It also encouraged customers to complete investor-information forms and suitability assessments online before visiting a branch. The changes will take effect in 2027 after industry-specific rules are revised and financial companies update their systems. The regulator plans to conduct simulated sign-ups to measure the results and identify further improvements.

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Financial firms tend to focus on formally fulfilling explanation duties to minimize legal responsibility rather than increasing consumers’ ability to understand.