The Semiconductor Boom and Foreign Omnibus Accounts Make It Easier to Enter the Korean Stock Market
June 6, 2026
Hajin Kim
Recently, the semiconductor market is growing very fast, and foreign investors are more interested in the Korean stock market than ever before. To follow this trend, Korean financial companies are starting to offer "foreign omnibus accounts" (integrated accounts) one after another. This service helps foreigners buy Korean stocks much more easily and conveniently.
A foreign omnibus account is a shared account that a foreign financial company opens with a Korean financial company. In the past, if foreigners wanted to trade Korean stocks, they had to open their own individual accounts in Korea, which was a very difficult and slow process. However, with this new service, foreigners do not need to make a new account in Korea. Instead, they can buy Korean stocks directly through the local companies they already use at home. The system works in a simple way: the foreign company collects stock orders from many different investors and sends them to the Korean company. Then, the Korean company buys and sells the stocks in the Korean market.
Among Korean companies, Hana Securities was the first to enter this market. Hana Securities started this service by working together with Emperor Securities in Hong Kong and Capital Partners in Japan. This June, they also plan to start the service with Futu Securities. Futu Securities is a huge digital stock company with about 246 trillion won in customer assets. Recently, Hana Securities is working hard to attract the Asian market. They even held a special meeting to introduce the Korean market and major companies to important clients from Hong Kong.
After Hana Securities, Samsung Securities also joined the market by partnering with Interactive Brokers (IBKR), a major global stock company. IBKR is a huge online stock platform connected to more than 170 markets around the world. Because Samsung Securities teamed up with this large platform that already has millions of users worldwide, it has become much easier for international investors to enter the Korean stock market.
As these major companies continue to start new services, experts say that the Korean stock market has become much easier for foreign investors to reach. Now that the walls to buying stocks are lower, people expect that foreign trading will increase in the mid-to-long term. This is expected to bring positive changes to the Korean stock market.
