금융감독기구의 구조 설계에 관한 소고- 쌍봉형 감독기구의 도입검토와 금융소비자보호원 설립논의를 중심으로

There is lots of criticism in Korea that our financial customers have been successfully protected. For recent example, Korean financial customers have been suffered huge loss from imperfect sales of KIKO, ELS or Mutual Savings banks’ subordinated bonds. In the other side of these failures in appropriate protection of financial customers, there is fundamental insufficiency both in the philosophy about the importance of protecting financial customer and in the legal infrastructure including alternative dispute resolution. Based on the costly experience, tentatively named Act on Financial Customer Protection is in process of being enacted in the Korean Assembly for more efficient protective mechanism. Moreover, along with the issue of reforming present financial supervisory system into efficient one for stable financial system and better financial customer protection, there are dispute about which system would be recommendable for Korea among present integrated one and so-called twin-peaks one. Twin-peaks system means that there are two equally positioned financial supervisors where prudential supervisor and business behaviour supervisor exist. Asserters of the twin-peaks system say that this system is more efficient for better protection of financial customers because it makes each supervisor focus on its own goal. This paper casts doubt on the issue of whether twin-peaks system would be working efficiently in Korea and suggests what we really need for this purpose instead of introducing twin-peaks system. Furthermore, this paper also deals with the current issues of necessity of independent agency for further improved protection of financial customers.