在韩国清理第一

When the International Monetary Fund demanded that South Korea sell bankrupt Korea First Bank to a foreign firm as a part of its $58 billion rescue package for the country in the midst of the 1997-'98 Asian financial crisis, U.S.-based private equity firm Newbridge Capital emerged as the only serious bidder. Not that Newbridge's early interest made a sale any easier or quicker. To meet an IMF requirement, the Korea Deposit Insurance Corp.,

the government agency that owned the bank, tried -- to no avail -- to drum up offers from other international investors for 18 months. "Nobody was interested during the financial crisis. Nobody was willing to take the risk to buy a bankrupt bank," recalls Weijian Shan, a Newbridge managing partner who commuted from his Hong Kong base and whiled away his days at the Seoul Hilton waiting for phone calls from government officials that never came.

KDIC认为山庄的资金太少，以控制危机前的国家最大的银行，如果购买后额外的糟糕贷款，他想要太多的保证。“他是一个艰难的谈判代表，”韩国政府官员说。

最后，山的坚持下了。在1999年的最后一天，国际货币基金组织截止日期已过期一年，双方达成了历史性协议。Newbridge为51％的韩国支付了5亿美元（KDIC保留了其余的），首尔同意吸收未来两年内发现的任何不完整的贷款。是一个外国公司的第一次 -

Newbridge is a joint creation of U.S. private equity specialists Texas Pacific Group and Blum Capital Partners -- was allowed to control and run a South Korean financial institution, competing freely in a market where personal relationships counted for more than collateral, and the government and the massive local conglomerates known asChaebol.传统上对银行的术语决定。该交易是一个“大事事事”，韩国金融学院资金研究所高级研究员Sohn Sang Ho表示将当地市场开放到外国参与，该等议员，由银行和政府支持的智库。

The Newbridge executive team, initially led by American Wilfred Horie, who had set up the Japanese unit of consumer lender Associates First Capital Corp., now part of Citigroup, wasted little time revamping the institution, known locally as Jeil Bank (in Korean,Jeil.意味着最好或先）。他们削减了银行对巨大的企业贷款的依赖Chaebol.那pushed into such personal finance areas as mortgages, credit cards and household loans, installed first-rate risk management systems, implemented international accounting standards in advance of local rivals and centralized much of the bank's decision-making processes. Newbridge's discipline and controls worked. When SK Global, the trading arm of the country's third-biggestChaebol.那SK Group, collapsed under 10 trillion won ($8.3 billion) in debt and other liabilities last year, Korea First, once a major lender to SK Global, was the only big bank with no exposure. "We got out of it before the crisis hit," says Shan, who has helped shape the bank's strategy and monitors its progress closely.

今天，韩国首先是一个截然不同的银行，比1997年近乎破产的银行更加多样化。公司贷款，在20世纪90年代中期占韩国首个投资组合的90％以上，现在占了约40％消费者财务占剩余的。飙升的抵押业务占消费者金融业务的一半以上，其他类型的家庭贷款和信用卡的较小部分。

Newbridge的变化逐渐恢复了韩国恢复健康。资产增长了近25％，达到40万亿韩元，自2000年初以来，1998年的不良贷款，超过20％，已达到1.54％，是该国任何商业银行的最低水平。韩国首先的效率等级 - 营业费用除以总收入 - 仅限60％以下是韩国银行最好的。虽然持平的950亿韩元，韩国首先的税前利润比2003年大部分竞争对手更好地举行了，当年一年中的经济衰退和巨额信用卡措施迫使许多人报告亏损时。“Jeil是韩国最远的干净银行，”研究员Sohn说。

所有这一切都留下了山，他还用作董事会成员，在令人愉快的位置。经过四年多的艰苦工作，他们正准备出售他们的控股，以其有限的合作伙伴的大量利润退出投资。而这次山不必担心返回他的电话。全球金融公司和其他投资者在韩国巩固银行市场的一个地方是欢呼。即使政府现在也欢迎外国人。“竞争应该是一个良好的市场力量，”该国金融监管机构金融监管服务副州长哦Kap Soo Soo说。“没有对外国投资的抵制。”

在最引人注目的发展中，花旗集团，其花旗银行子公司拥有十几个地方分支机构，于二月末同意，韩国拨打27.3亿美元，韩国略大的竞争对手韩国银行，赢得了43万亿韩元。If approved by shareholders next month, the Citigroup purchase will give a consortium led by two U.S.-based private equity firms, the Carlyle Group and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.'s J.P. Morgan Corsair II Capital Partners, a sparkling 125 percent return on its 37 percent KorAm stake, bought about three years ago for roughly $450 million. Now Citigroup competitors HSBC Holdings and Standard Chartered are expected to intensify their search for local partners.

韩国首先是一个明显的目标，纽布里奇很可能是非常接受的。罗伯特科恩（Robert Cohen）在2001年成功担任首席执行官，告诉亚博赞助欧冠甚至在花旗集团的古兰经收购之前，韩国首先想要在2005年销售或公开。韩国的经济正在拉出去年的低迷，当地银行似乎已经把他们的大规模信用卡贷款的最糟糕的价格放在了他们身后。COHEN说，如果改善高效的经营风格，韩国首先的高效经营风格应允许它允许将大量利润收益发布到2003年的成果，并提高其价值仍然进一步推动其价值。经验丰富的法国银行家，Cohen在巴黎和纽约与CréditLyonnais度过了25年，担任阿迪诺纳州的第1989年至1997年。然后，他成为纽约共和国银行共和国银行副主席，负责私人和企业银行，但留下了1999年，在汇丰银公司购买它之前只是一个月。

The China-born Shan and his Korea First team have good reason not to wait too long. The competitive landscape has changed substantially since Newbridge's arrival. New management has put Korea First right, but it now finds itself much further behind its rivals than before in terms of scale. Kookmin Bank, South Korea's dominant institution, engineered a merger with Housing & Commercial Bank in 2001 and now has a market-leading 219 trillion won in assets; Woori Bank, which absorbed several institutions from the government and remains mostly state owned, is No. 2, with 109 trillion won in assets. Onetime market leader Korea First now ranks as the smallest of the country's eight nationwide commercial lenders.

一些分析师认为，如果没有韩国的交易，韩国银行巨头中的第一个风险迷失了。正如穆迪的投资者服务金融机构高级分析师Beatrice Woo在1月份的一份报告中指出，该国四个最大的银行现在拥有75％的市场。她写的小型机构已经“竞争困难，可能必须采用利基角色或面部边缘化。”在Citi-Koram交易宣布之前，Woo首先将韩国和韩国算作收购候选人。韩国财政研究所的纽布里奇很快就会搬家。鉴于其团队已经制造的所有改进，他说：“没有人确信我们是否可以预期更高的效率。”翻译：没有理由等待。

Even so, the patient Shan insists Newbridge is not in a huge rush to make a deal. "Everybody would say the franchise is worth more than when we started," says Shan, once a management professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a former managing director at J.P. Morgan in Hong Kong who was primarily responsible for the bank's investments in China. "We've invested more than $500 million in the bank. The bank started with 1 trillion won in capital. Now it's got 1.6 trillion won in capital. We've made a substantial amount of capital."

当新桥首先购买了韩国时，银行从大量贷款到金融危机中的一些最严重的损害，包括大宇集团，该集团于1999年中期折叠，债务超过800亿美元，并在1998年失败并且其自动筹备单位后来拍卖到现代汽车公司的拍卖，从1997年底到1998年底，外汇危机从700美元到美元派出到近2,000美元到美元汇率。由于巨大的贷款减记，借贷标准和赢得胜利的下降，韩国第一款1997年12月（1997年汇率约为4000亿美元的资产）在2001年年底（2001年汇率为210亿美元的汇率）到24.1亿韩元较低的速度）。

Horie通过将国际贷款标准应用于当地公司，并削减无法实现绩效基准的借款人来开始转变，例如3％的资产回报。为了限制其风险，韩国首先拒绝扩大任何超过2000亿韩元的公司贷款，甚至超过现代电机和三星电子等信誉借款人，甚至超过其总权益的约20％。1998年，银行仅接触大宇已超过2万亿韩元。

Horie's defining moment came in 2000, when the government's Korea Development Bank approached the biggest South Korean banks for help in underwriting a bond offering to aid troubled local companies. Horie alone refused to participate -- the first time anyone could remember a South Korean bank turning down a government request to lend money.

霍莉也是一种文化化妆品。与淀粉，曾经主导韩国银行业的偏远高级高管不同，他采用了一种更加非正式的方法，使得这种象征性的姿态作为开启所有员工的首席执行官的私人电梯。在他的任期结束时，Horie开始在基于绩效的薪酬制度上工作，奖励副总统和上述副总裁最具生产力的高管。“这是一场革命性的，”科恩说，他希望将该计划扩展到所有银行5,000名员工。对于韩国的工会银行工人习惯于均匀分布的自动工资增加，优点提升的前景一直令人不安。他们的联盟原则上达成了变革，而是对标准化工资的谈判也是如此。

These changes were all part of an effort by Horie to shift the bank from its dependence on corporate business to the consumer markets. This revamping wasn't always easy for Horie, who bore the brunt of the government and corporate criticism of the bank's occasionally hardball tactics with clients. But he offers no apologies.

"I turned it around into a retail bank," says Horie, 58, whose abrupt retirement ended quickly when he was named head of Japanese mortgage specialist First Credit Corp. in Tokyo. "I put in most of the platforms, the procedures that would make it into a retail bank. It was primarily a question of reducing exposure in large corporations. Everything we did was designed to turn this bank from a corporate lender aligned with the government into a retail bank."

在他的变化中，霍莉扩展了韩国首先是对零售市场的新闻信誉审查，并通过将贷款批准过程从分支机构拉出并将其集中在首尔。该银行创建了一组负责审查每个消费贷款申请的50名分析师。“我们已经让自己的数据仓库监控客户[客户]的背景和历史和能力偿还，”通信和信息技术执行副总裁Hyun Jae Myung说。

当然，消费者金融不是一个灵丹妙药，因为信用卡发行人在韩国学到。“这是一个疯狂的市场，其特点是疯狂的产品，”韩国首席消费者风险官Keith Shachat说。“韩国最受欢迎的产品被称为减去贷款。只要您在您的信用额度内，您就不必支付您的兴趣，因此其他银行的90％的常规银行贷款减去贷款。这是不可能的如果您不提供该产品，请做意，但我们为其收取额外兴趣。“

它已落到科恩，55岁，拥有监督私人银行，资本市场和企业和零售贷款的广泛经验，以加速堀江推入消费市场，并将银行的企业贷款计划追溯到轨道上。“最初，他们只关注资产质量，”信贷瑞士第一个波士顿首尔分公司的研究总监Yun Seok说。“两年前，他们试图成长。”

韩国的整体贷款去年增加了45％，援助其抵押贷款组合的增加了一倍。韩国首先的400个分支机构最近一年的抵押贷款已经搅拌了15,000次抵押贷款，而不是该国的任何其他银行。这使它占10.5％的份额，落后于巨大的Kookmin，该次数控制了近80％的市场。

As part of a reorganization in 2002, a few months after Horie's departure, the bank installed call centers and more sophisticated back-office information technology systems that freed roughly 1,000 branch staff members to focus on selling mortgage and other consumer products while leaving credit decisions and paperwork to others. Each prospective borrower's credit risk is assessed, and mortgage pricing is adjusted accordingly by the analysts in Seoul. "We are like a factory," says Cohen of Korea First's highly profitable mortgage business.

银行的信用卡迟到的开始致力于其青睐。全国范围内，2002年飙升的银行信用卡的拖欠率，2003年达到13％以上的13％，然后再次下降到大约12％。虽然韩国首先是2003年的不良信用卡贷款贷款9.94％，但远远超过威尔尼信用卡单位的令人震惊的32.97％或Kookmin的15.21％。韩国首先抛开了221亿韩元，以覆盖2003年的额外信用卡损失，并相信最坏的情况结束。

Meantime, Cohen and his lending officers have managed to soothe some of the bad feelings among corporate borrowers, and the corporate loan portfolio has grown from 5.7 trillion won at the end of 2001 to about 10 trillion at the close of 2003. Korea First has tried to balance risk with reward. A growing proportion of its corporate loans are structured-finance transactions secured by cash flows. Branches are no longer able to lend to local businesses without permission from headquarters, and concentration risk is strictly monitored to ensure that Korea First doesn't repeat the mistakes of the mid-1990s.

“这是我们开展业务的方式。通过集中信用，您对整个银行有一致的承保和标准，”山说。

科恩并没有牺牲对贷款的纪律堀。金融监管服务的一份报告显示，韩国首先是不合适的贷款。2003年不完美的公司贷款仅为1.1％。相比之下，Kookmin的公司贷款的NPL比率为3.59％。除了信用卡之外，韩国首先的消费者金融资产负债表同样干净。家庭贷款的不良比率为1.36％，大致符合当地平均水平，其抵押贷款拖欠仅为0.5％。

“我们无法避免行业衰退，但可能是管理消费者贷款方面的最佳状态，”信息专家炫。

相反，随着韩国首先，韩国首先是在分析师的经济继续增长的情况下达到大幅增长。

韩国第一的命运的猜测,the bank has attempted to play the consolidation game itself. In 2002 Cohen tried to make a deal for Chohung Bank, then South Korea's fifth-largest bank, with assets of 57.9 trillion won. The deal would have vaulted Korea First from eighth to third place, close to second-ranked Woori in assets. Chohung's bigger credit card business and solid customer base would have supplemented Korea First's consumer finance push. But the government, which owned the bank, said a local buyer made a better offer. Shinhan Financial Group, whose chief holding is Shinhan Bank, South Korea's fourth largest, got Chohung for 900 billion won in cash and Shinhan Financial shares worth 1.6 trillion won.

科恩说，他不应支付这种过高的价格，愿望首次给予韩国的提议更加认真考虑。“政府在真正的市场交易或对韩国的内部交易之间进行了选择，”他说。“我们永远不会支付Shinhan的支付。谢南支付了高价，即使它没有立即有协同作用。”

在韩国的银行市场下，Shinhan愿意在朝鲜银行市场的旋风交配游戏中愿意支付保费。刚刚看到竞争对手Hana Bank购买了政府的Seoulbank，形成了该国的第三大银行。在Shinhan的交易之后不久，美国私募股权公司唯一的恒星购买了51％的韩国交易所银行，资产赢得了61万亿美元，以12亿美元。

新韩收购也证明了风险s a buyer must assume in South Korea's unpredictable marketplace. Almost immediately, Shinhan had to make concessions: Chohung workers, who threatened to strike, won an agreement that their bank would remain a separate entity for at least three years, effectively scuttling many of the planned cost savings.

最近的交易,加上困难时期许多当地banks experienced in 2003, are fueling rumors that Hana might consider buying Korea First as a way to catch up with Kookmin and Woori. But many observers dismiss this possibility because Hana must first integrate SeoulBank.

如果Citi-Koram交易通过，Cohen可能会发现自己再次与汇丰银行交谈，它买了以前的雇主共和国，被视为买出新桥或渣打银行的最重要候选人。两者都在韩国经营，并将受益于收购遵守西方标准的银行。“我的感觉是Newbridge将像汇丰银行那样卖给另一家外国投资者，”首尔三星证券银行分析师Jason Yu说。“他们将卖给另一个银行的最佳替代品”，这些银行分享许多相同的系统和策略。

本地媒体建议，四年前从政府购买Seoulbank的汇丰汇丰不成功地购买了SEOULBANK，已经与Newbridge谈到了关于购买韩国的首次股权。韩国第一发言人否认了这些报道，虽然首尔的高级汇丰经理笑着说，“这些都是令人兴奋的时代。我听到了谣言，”拒绝详细说明。

Standard Chartered, meanwhile, persists in holding on to its 9.76 percent stake in KorAm, waiting to see if Citigroup is able to win shareholder approval for its deal. Some KorAm stockholders have indicated they want a higher price, and Standard Chartered wants to be able to step into the breach if Citigroup can't close the deal. If, as anticipated, Citigroup's offer is accepted, Standard Chartered is expected to start hunting for a new partner, with Korea First a likely target.

Even with KorAm in tow, Citigroup isn't entirely out of the picture for Korea First. Postmerger, Citi-KorAm would still rank as South Korea's seventh biggest, and a combination with Korea First would vault it into the top echelon. Stephen Long, CEO of Citigroup Corporate and Investment Banking Group Asia Pacific, says, however, that his group will focus on building what it has bought. "We have no plans beyond what is done to maximize the value that is already there," he says.

科恩坚持认为，韩国的小尺寸不会使它对买家不那么吸引人。他说，更重要的是，“这是一家美国风格的银行”，在韩国有利地增长和经营。他补充说，外国买家更愿意购买一个较小的机构，而不是说Kookmin，他的巨大规模将给大多数机构都在韩国更加暴露而不是他们想要的。

Korea First's other alternative, an IPO, is less appealing: It wouldn't allow Newbridge to realize a premium for selling control to a single buyer, and South Korea's banking sector usually trades at a discount to global markets because of investor concerns about corporate governance and government influence. Cohen acknowledges that under the right circumstances Newbridge might offer a 10 percent stake to the public while co-owner KDIC sold a similar amount. A piecemeal sale, however, would drag out the process, and success would depend on the state of South Korea's volatile local markets.

如果不管是什么原因，山都不能达成协议 - 销售或IPO - 首席执行官COHEN表示，最糟糕的事情是，新桥的投资组合将继续举办一个韩国银行，在30百分比年夹。“每个人都知道Newbridge将有一天留下。它可能是一年或三年或十年，”他说。“我们高度务实。我们将抓住机会。”