Shinhan and Hana Both Top Korea's 2026 Service Quality Index

Two of South Korea’s largest lenders have each claimed the top spot in the 2026 Korea Service Quality Index (KSQI), the annual customer-experience benchmark run by the Korea Management Association Consulting (KMAC). Shinhan Bank was named the leading firm in the banking industry for the 16th consecutive year, while Hana Bank finished first in the customer-contact (front-desk service) category for the 11th year in a row. Because KMAC scores different dimensions of service separately, both banks can legitimately hold a No. 1 title at the same time — one measured across the banking sector as a whole, the other measured at the point where staff meet customers.

How Two Banks Can Both Finish First

The KSQI is not a single league table. KMAC evaluates service quality across industry-wide rankings and narrower functional categories such as the interactions that take place at branch counters and call centers. Shinhan’s award places it at the head of the banking industry classification, a broad measure of overall service delivery. Hana’s award sits in the customer-contact dimension, which weighs how consistently frontline employees handle in-person and telephone interactions. The distinction matters: a reader scanning the day’s business pages might assume the two claims conflict, but they describe separate scoreboards.

Shinhan’s Sixteen-Year Run

A 16-year streak places Shinhan’s banking-industry ranking among the longest unbroken records in the survey. The bank has grown from modest beginnings into one of the country’s dominant retail lenders. Shinhan opened in 1982 with roughly 25 billion won in capital, about 279 employees and just three branches under founding chief Kim Se-chang. Through its 2006 absorption of Chohung Bank — a deal in which Chohung formally took over Shinhan before adopting the Shinhan name — the institution can trace its roots to Hanseong Bank, founded in 1897 and among the oldest banks in Korea. By 2016 the bank’s assets had reached about 298.945 trillion won, with deposits near 221 trillion and loans around 212 trillion. That scale, built partly through early overseas expansion such as a Ho Chi Minh City branch opened in December 1994, is the backdrop against which its service ranking has held for a decade and a half.

Hana’s Streak at the Counter

Hana Bank’s 11-year hold on the customer-contact category points to sustained performance at the branch-and-call-center layer, where service scores rise or fall on staff training, wait times and complaint handling rather than on balance-sheet size. The result also lands as Hana carries a high public profile through sponsorship: the lender holds the naming rights to the 2026–27 Hana Bank Korea Cup, South Korea’s national football knockout tournament, now in its 31st edition with 63 clubs entered and a calendar running from June 2026 to June 2027. Brand visibility of that kind does not feed directly into a KSQI score, which rests on evaluated service encounters, but it reinforces the consumer-facing positioning the ranking rewards.

What the Repeat Wins Show

Long consecutive streaks in the KSQI are difficult to sustain because the survey is repeated annually and rivals invest heavily to close service gaps. Holding a category for more than a decade implies that a bank has embedded service standards deep enough to survive staff turnover, branch closures and shifts toward digital channels. For Shinhan and Hana, the 2026 results extend records that now stretch across most of the smartphone-banking era — a period in which face-to-face service might have been expected to lose its measured value, yet remains a contested front in Korean retail banking.