Shinhan Bank to Provide 15 Trillion Won in Funding to SMEs for Lunar New Year

On January 19, Shinhan Bank announced that it will provide inclusive financial support totaling 15 trillion won to assist small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) facing difficulties in fund management due to a temporary increase in capital demand during the Lunar New Year holiday.

Through this initiative, Shinhan Bank will supply a total of 15.125 trillion won in funds by March 13, including 6.125 trillion won in new loans and 9 trillion won in loan maturity extensions.

Eligible companies can receive new loans of up to 1 billion won per company, within the scope of their funding needs. Additional financial support measures will also be implemented to ease the financial burden on businesses, such as maturity extensions without requiring partial principal repayment at maturity and deferral of installment repayments.

A Shinhan Bank representative stated, "We have prepared this financial support to help alleviate the funding burdens of our SME clients ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday," adding, "We will continue to do our best to practice inclusive finance for SMEs and small business owners."

Meanwhile, Shinhan Financial Group has previously announced plans to provide up to 17 trillion won in inclusive financial support. As part of this, the group is implementing the 'Help Up & Value Up' program, which includes uniformly lowering double-digit household loan interest rates to single digits and reducing interest rates on new credit loans for low-income individuals. In addition, for loans held by SMEs and individual business owners with interest rates exceeding 7% per annum, a program is being operated to automatically repay the loan principal using the excess interest amount (up to 3 percentage points) as the source of funds.

Starting at the end of this month, the 'Virtuous Cycle Inclusive Finance Program' will be launched. This program includes: ▲For individual business owners with low credit scores, if the interest rate exceeds 5% per annum, the excess amount (up to 4 percentage points) will be used to automatically repay the principal; ▲For low-credit individual customers using high-interest credit loans, the program will convert these to long-term fixed-rate loans.