Foreign nationals in Korea can send funds of up to $50,000 per year via overseas remittance, without submitting documents proving the source of funds. Amounts that exceed this limit, however, must be reported to authorities along with the relevant documents.
For specific information on the remittance requiring such documents, head to this page of the Easy Law website, and refer to the section titled "Overseas Remittance Requiring Supporting Documents."
For overseas transfers, foreigners must designate their foreign exchange bank under the related articles of the Foreign Exchange Transactions Regulation.
Foreigners sending more than $5,000 at once overseas must submit documents detailing the source of the funds and the reason for the transfer to the bank. If the remittance exceeds $10,000 per transaction, the transaction will be reported to the National Tax Service and Korea Customs Service.
Banks, but not banks?
There are financial institutions called "savings banks" that provide deposit and withdrawal, savings, loans and most other functions of commercial banks. Shinhan Financial Group, for example, controls Shinhan Bank and Shinhan Savings Bank.
The latter, like other savings banks, are categorized as non-banking financial institutions, and have a similar legal status to a securities company or Nonghyup -- National Agricultural Cooperation Federation.
In terms of basic functions, savings banks, Nonghyup and other similar cooperative federations can be considered commercial banks. But they are not governed by the Banking Act and are regulated by different laws, resulting in different interest rates for both deposits and loans.
Savings banks, for one, are supervised directly by the Financial Services Commission.
Such institutes are not lower-tiered financial institutions, but one should note that the non-banking institutes have different services than banks. One notable example is that some of the savings banks cannot let clients send money overseas.
