South Korea's five largest property and casualty insurers changed their auto insurance rates 83 times over the past six years, and the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) never once reviewed afterward whether those changes shifted costs onto policyholders. Insurers set their own rates, but because auto insurance is mandatory, the lack of oversight warrants scrutiny, critics say.
Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance (000810.KS), Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance (001450.KS), KB Insurance (002550.KS), DB Insurance (005830.KS) and Hanwha General Insurance (000370.KS), including Carrot General Insurance, changed auto insurance rates 83 times between January 2021 and August 2026, according to the office of Rep. Lee Kang-il of the Democratic Party of Korea, a member of the National Assembly's National Policy Committee, on the 22nd. The FSS conducted after-the-fact reviews in only six of those cases, or 7.2%, and never examined whether the costs were appropriately assigned — the test of who ultimately bears the expense.
Financial regulators scrapped the pre-filing requirement for insurance products in 2015 to give insurers more freedom in product development, but the follow-up checks that were supposed to replace it are not happening. Individual insurers all use the same reference pure premium rate system from the Korea Insurance Development Institute, which breaks out risk factors to calculate discounts and surcharges. Yet in the past six years, only three of the top five insurers' rate changes reflected that reference rate. The FSS says it collects underlying documents and conducts after-the-fact supervision when consumer protection requires it, but no substantive verification is taking place.
The deeper problem is that even when insurers change rates for identical reasons, they cite different legal grounds and assign the costs to different coverages. On July 1, 2024, all five insurers cut premiums by 0.1% in response to a revision of the enforcement decree of the Guarantee of Automobile Accident Compensation Act. DB Insurance assigned the contribution to bodily injury liability I, while the other four spread it across all coverages.
"If there is no advance review of insurance rates, after-the-fact review is the only tool left, and even that is empty," Lee said. "Setting rates can be left to insurers, but it needs to be managed because the burden on all policyholders increases."