주가연계증권(ELS)의 소비자 이해 수준에 관한 사례 연구

Consumer damages have been rapidly increasing as the kinds of financial investment become various and derivative securities are increasing owing to the development of financial engineering. Derivative securities have been developed with complex profit structures calculated from financial engineering perspectives. Since similar kinds of items are developed and circulated worldwide almost at the same time, the types of consumer damages tend to be very similar. In Korea, there have been several incidents of consumer damage including close manipulation incident(2009), KIKO(2010), damaging consumers many times due to unfair transaction related with derivatives as well as ELS(Equity-Linked Securities) related ones. This study analysed the level of understanding of financial products, investment goals, the expectation level for product explanation, and regulation measures through focus group interviews with 13 consumers purchasing ELS products. The goals of this research are to analyse what is the better way of information offering to financial consumers and judge the effectiveness of current information offering with mandatory explanation. The research result showed that the contents and order of prospectus are organized to induce investment by evaluating the danger of ELS investment low rather than offering neutral and understandable information systematically. Consumers are surveyed to want to know the essential information: expected earnings rate, loss degree of risk, statistics of loss estimation by empirical result, and fees, which should be appropriate for consumer's eye level. The amount of information should be considered for financial consumers and the processing of information for the actual application of consumers should be considered as an important factor, resulting in the enhancement of financial consumers' competence. Regulations for the products and investment organizations and duties of them are necessarily essential, while related law-making, amendments, and the reinforcement of the efforts of supervisory organizations are also required. This study could be used as baseline data for practical and effective information offering model, which could evaluate the effectiveness of current information offering for financial consumers and enhance their financial literacy.