Shinhan Bank's Top Award
The bank clinches National Quality Management Award for its exemplary service

Every officer and staff at the Shinhan Bank is extremely glad that the bank has won the 2005 National Quality Management Award in the service sector. They always believed that bankers should have trust and honesty as their motto ever since they began to learn to walk as bankers and they have been observing that motto so far.
Furthermore, the bank placed its management standards on customers and jobsites in its operation and always thankful to its customers for the award, believing that the award came from supporting their customers. A business cannot exist without customers, the bank believed in the saying, which was why it has been trying to provide better services to its customers than its rival banks. Accordingly, the bank thinks that customer satisfaction management is not a simple service, but a vital one that will decide whether a bank exists or exits from the market.
Customer satisfaction management is more than basic customer service, but it is intended to provide a core value because the bank has been pursuing customer satisfaction expanded to include all related parties including employees, shareholders and society, not limited customers that have dealings with the bank.
Shinhan Bank is one of the top banks in the country with high margin of earnings and steady growth in assets, which won it Awards for Excellence 2005 Best Bank in Korea from Euromoney this year. Its ROA jumped from 0.7 percent in 2001 to 1.15 percent last year with ROE rising from 10.7 percent in 2001 to 22.5 percent in 2004. Its net profit expanded from 347.1 billion won to 844.1 billion won in 2004, an increase of 143 percent. Its loans grew from 31.8 trillion won in 2001 to 50.7 trillion won in 2004, expanding 8 percent annual average in the past three years and total deposits rose from 43.6 trillion won to 59 trillion won in 2004 due to the bank's stability and high brand image, growing at an annual average of 6.2 percent.
The ratio of non-performing assets stood at 1.39 percent in 2004, down sharply from 2.42 percent in 2001. The BIS ratio reached 11.9 percent in 2004 compared to 12 percent in 2001. The bank has been operating a number of systems to secure a sound base for its asset management including CSS system to provide loans on a rational basis, with a speedy credit analysis to approve loan applications. The bank also introduced the regular loan review system to reduce the amount of bad loans, which worked to bring down its bad loan ratio to the lowest among banks in the country. The bank? evaluation of its operation carried out by the Financial Supervisory Service ranked in the top 10 percent among banks in the country for 4 years in a row.
The bank has a diversified service reform to keep customers and gain new customers, which have been rising due to these efforts. The bank has been making regular checks on customer satisfaction by its branches and monitoring counter windows to analyze the quality of its services so that they could be reflected in its policies and strategies designed to upgrade its service quality. As a result, the bank won the Korea Service Grand Award for two years in a row from the Korea Standard Association and the top position in the Korea Service Quality Index provided by the Korea Productivity Center for 4 years in a row. The bank also came in first in the evaluation of civil petition cases made by the Financial Supervisory Service during the second half of 2002 and the first half of 2004. Last year, the bank won second place in the banking industry and the top place among nationwide commercial banks.
The satisfaction level of its employees by NORM provided by the Korea Research recorded "good"in 2003 and maintained the same level in 2004 coming closer to the excellence level and based on these merits, the bank clinched the wonderful working place award provided by the Eltech Trust Research Institute.
Shinhan will continue to strive to be a representative financial institution after merging with Chohung Bank next year. nw

Shinhan Bank President &CEO Shin Sang-hoon.