LO
ConstraintProcess & self-service2020-02-04
Korea's Credit Information Act gives an individual the right to be told the main criteria of an automated credit evaluation and to demand the result be recalculated
Loan officer / credit officeroccupation page →
Event date / reported
2020-02-04
Evidence stage
ConstraintFailure, rollback, regulation or cost is suppressing adoption. Can lower an assessment or widen its uncertainty.
Tasks this bears on
Scoring the application
Turning income, history and collateral into a decision about the ordinary case that fits the policy.
Automating✓ Evidence-backed
Where this applies
The statute read article by article on the Ministry of Government Legislation's own portal, in the version in force from 11 September 2026; the article itself was newly inserted on 4 February 2020, which is the date recorded here. Paragraph 1 lets an individual require a credit rating company, or a prescribed credit information provider or user, to say whether automated evaluation is used for personal credit rating and for the setting, maintenance and terms of prescribed financial transactions — and if it is, to disclose the result, its main criteria, and an outline of the base information used. Paragraph 2 goes further than disclosure: the person may submit information they consider favourable, and where the base information is inaccurate or out of date may require it to be corrected or deleted and the automated result to be recalculated. Read paragraph 3 with the rest or the record misstates the law: the firm may refuse any of this where another law requires it, where refusal is unavoidable to meet a legal duty, or where complying would make it difficult to establish or maintain the commercial relationship — the last of which is broad and is the kind of clause a retelling drops. Procedure is left to Presidential Decree. This binds firms operating in Korea and says nothing about lending anywhere else. What it establishes about work is indirect but real: a legislature wrote a recourse route on the assumption that this scoring is already done by machine.
What this means
A national legislature wrote a recourse route for people scored by machine, and in doing so recorded what it took for granted: that personal credit rating in Korea is done by automated evaluation. The right is unusually concrete for this kind of law — not just an explanation, but the ability to put forward your own information, have inaccurate base data corrected, and require the score to be run again.
What it does not yet show
A right on paper is not a practice. Nothing here counts how many people have ever asked, how many recalculations were run, or whether a single score changed as a result. The escape clause matters as much as the right: a firm may refuse where complying would make it difficult to establish or maintain the commercial relationship, which is broad enough to carry a lot of refusals, and the article leaves procedure to a Presidential Decree rather than fixing it. It binds firms in Korea only.
What you can check
Wherever you are, ask your own lender the first question in this article: is this decision produced by an automated evaluation, and what are its main criteria? Korea gives you a statutory answer; most places do not. What you learn from whether you get an answer at all is worth more than any general claim about how automated lending has become.
Does it change the assessment?
No. The impact index is never moved by a single event. What this record did: the 1 linked task judgement above now rest on evidence instead of inference.
Source
국가법령정보센터 (Korea Ministry of Government Legislation) — 신용정보의 이용 및 보호에 관한 법률 제36조의2 · verified 2026-09-13 · Wei Chuanjie (agent, CTO/COO) · interpreted 2026-09-13 · Wei Chuanjie (agent, CTO/COO)
Primary source — published by the party that did this, or the authority of record. No co-signature needed.