You Can’t Buy Anything On-Line in Korea, Mr. Foreigner

I've talked about it before but Brendon Carr in his Korea Law Blog throws in his two cents on the matter.

The Great Korean Bank Customer Service Questionnaire

I've mentioned once or twice in the past about my frustration with Korean banks, but the JoongAng Daily has recently confirmed what I've largely suspected: Korea banks have separate and discriminatory policies when dealing with foreigners living in Korea:

According to Lee, each local bank has different policies on issuing cards. Some banks issue the debit card without any restriction on foreigners while others limit the amount of money a foreigner can withdraw with the card to 10,000 dollars on a given trip out of the country. Many banks simply won’t issue any debit card to foreigners.

While researching this article I came across a KEB survey via Korea4Expats. It's a real nice effort and explains why the bank was tied for first place in Teaching Kimchi's bank poll. However I'm still sold on CitiBank for it's almost scary global dominance.

The Money in ESL/EFL

Teaching Kimchi has another nice table comparing ESL salaries and whatnot from a collection of countries:

Country	Monthly Salary (USD)	Insurance	Flight	Housing	Severance
Dubai	$3,200-5,000	No	Yearly Return Airfare	Free and Furnished	No
Taiwan	$3,000-4,000	Depends on program	No	Free not furnished	No
Korea	$2,000-2,300	Depends on your salary	Roundtrip	Furnished Apt.	One month salary after contract
Japan	$2,000	Depends on program	Roundtrip	Depends on program	Extended holidays
Thailand	$800-1,000	Depends on program	Roundtrip	Depends on program	Depends on school
Russia	$900	No	Roundtrip	Free and furnished	No
China	$400-550	No	Depends on length	Free and furnished	One month salary
Vietnam	$370	Depends	Depends on length	Free local food	No

One thing that is lacking is adjustments for the cost of living. For example, the cost of eating in Dubai is $450 US per month but in Taiwan it's around $140 US (NT$150 x 30 days) and in Korea it's around $270 per month.

Korean Banks

Earning money in Korea requires a bank account and you usually open one right after you become legal. Teaching Kimchi has a nice survey about the various banks in Korea and Just Landed informs us that there are

19 banks are operating in South Korea; the “Big Four” - Kookmin Bank, Shinhan Financial Group, Woori Financial Group and Hana Bank - control 70 per cent of the market. With the exception of Woori, three of the top four banks are majority-owned by foreigners.

and that,

Citibank Korea, Korea Exchange Bank, Woori Bank, and Hana Bank are just a few exceptional banks that have experience with foreign clients. Such foreigner-friendly banks may even let you use the currency of your choice.

There's of tons information from guides and foreigners about opening up an account but (like getting credit cards) your experience will vary from teller to teller, manager to manager, and even from branch to branch. Like my adventures in getting a Korean keyboard I opted for the first thing that I saw, Shinhan bank, and if i could do it over again I would do it a bit different.

I'll go along with Teaching Kimchi's rating of a 3/5 since Shinhan is large enough to know what they're doing on the banking side of things (well, kind of) but, while their English support exists, it's hardly supportive. In hindsight, I should have identified the key foreigner specific services that I wanted and not assume that I would get the same package that I have back home. For example let's look at the Shinhan Cheque Card that comes with your account. Everybody gets one:

...my bankcard is a Manchester United card. Park Ji-Sung is the miracle man in Korea.

The gave me the same Manchester United card and I immediately asked if I could switch if for Arsenal. Unfortunately the lady behind the counter stared at me with confusion and my translator informed me that it was the only card that they had.

This is Korean monoculture at it's best: since there is one Premier Korean on the team, Manchester United is now Korea's Team. What gets me is that most of the people I meet are not Manchester supporters but Park Ji-sung supporters. This is a crucial element to supporting a team in the Premier league. If Park were to leave the team how much would Manchester stock be worth? It's the same with Henry and Arsenal. Any true supporter knows his where his allegiances lie. But I digress.

The real problem with the Shinhan cheque card is that it's only valid within Korea. Escaping the country is less fun when you can't access your funds and the only way you can access your funds outside of the country is by wire transfer. This is nothing new and is part of Korean Monoculture that propagates low-trust policies against foreigners.

I'm starting to realize that the banks that I need either have good foreigner relation departments, or (as a result of the global market) are actually foreign banks operating in the Korean market:

One of America's top banks, Citibank, has more than 240 locations all over Korea. Teachers with an account back home can access their funds with no fees, though depositing money in their account from Korea does have some restrictions. Visit the Citibank Korea English website for branch locations.

I could change banks, or even open multiple accounts, but right now Shinhan isn't bad enough to warrant the effort.

Korean Computer Monoculture

Pandora.tv is an amazing site that hosts South Park videos subtitled in Korean and it's a high school native speaker's dream.

But there's one problem. It doesn't work for me. In fact a lot of Korean website simply do not work for me and as I was trying to figure out why I stumbled across this blog post from Mozilla in Asia that links Technology & Monoculture together. The post tells me that practically all Korean sites are made for Internet Explorer running on Windows circa 2000 and any other kind of configuration (like a FireFox running on a Mac circa 2007) is blatantly ignored. There's a couple follow-ups describing some hope and progress and there's even some valid change, but 6 months after most of these stories broke, Korean computer monoculture is still annoying westerners.

So I go back to pandora.tv, this time with Internet Explorer running on Windows (courtesy of my school) and it does indeed work, but not before the site installed a collection of ActiveX Controls, something that the blog post predicted and warned about.

Now in the grand scheme of things, being forced to watch Korean subtitled videos on a windows machine isn't really a big deal. But it's frustrating when this computer monoculture creeps into other aspects of my online world. For example:

Each Korean citizen is issued a nation ID number. This is embedded into the certificate issued by the Korean CA. Thus non-Koreans in Korea (such as US military in Korea) cannot make secure transactions like online banking or online commerce. The ‘package’ (including SEED, the national ID, and the Active-X cert.) that the CA’s distribute is Active-X based, and thus only works in Windows and IE.

There's a lot of geek words in that paragraph but you can see this as an explanation for why foreigners can't buy stuff on the Korean Internets, especially escape tickets.

It also explains why Internet Banking is such a needless complication. My banking package, like the kind offered free of charge by Shinhan Bank, only works on Windows machines running Internet Explorer. Seems simple enough, but this certificate that they're talking about is an actual file. And it's a file that I have to present every time I log into my account, which means if I try to access my account from another computer I must somehow materialize, via a floppy disk or whatever, this file to be examined. After that, I also need to install a third party program (Inisafe by Initech—no, not this Initech) to process this certificate and ensure that whatever transactions do occur are secure. Only then, after I've got

1. Windows
2. Internet Explorer
3. Certificate File
4. Inisafe
5. Password

can I look at my bank balance. By comparison all of these extra steps are needless hoops that I have to jump through and they end up elevating the North American system of a simple userid & password to a something akin of universal access.

This computer monoculture reveals some aspect of the Korean psyche that I'm failing to understand and unfortunately I can't quite describe it. It's a narcissism or nationalism that drives them to spend so much effort in developing their own way of doing things that they fail to see the easier, cheaper or more efficient path. I could see it from a perspective of competition or even going after a niche market but why then be so exclusive? It's probably another facet of the culture difference that I'm failing to grasp, but it's strong enough to make me doubt validity of any Korean high tech idea that exist solely in Korea.