Last month, a Samsung Securities employee mistakenly paid out two-point-eight billion shares in dividends.<br />In response to the so called "Fat Finger Error", South Korea's financial bodies plan to roll out new trading measures to prevent similar mishaps. <br />Oh Soo-young reports. <br /> Korea's market authorities will enforce more stringent trading measures on securities firm employees selling their company stocks.<br /> The Financial Services Commission and other key regulators on Monday announced a set of measures to prevent erroneous transactions, and regain the trust of investors after Samsung Securities' fat-finger incident last month.<br /> Samsung Securities accidentally paid out two-point-eight billion shares in dividends to its employees. <br />This caused massive market confusion, as five-million ghost shares worth 184 million U.S. dollars, were subsequently sold off before the system was fixed.<br />Regulators have largely blamed the lax monitoring system which failed to prevent a large-scale sell-off of stocks that only existed on paper.<br />In order to prevent similar accidents, regulators plan to require securities firms to adopt a real-time monitoring system rather than managing the balance of stocks after market close.<br />This new real-time system discloses the balance and trade volume of stocks at the time of trading, which will help to make sure the transactions are legitimate.<br />An alarm will be raised on orders that exceed the approved ratio of tradable stocks, and financial bodies will have to approve large-scale orders that exceed the ratio, as well as any potentially erroneous orders.<br />And an emergency button system will allow the security firm to pull the breaks on any faulty transactions.<br />Securities firms will also have to improve the way they manage their employee stock ownership system, separating the processing of cash dividends and stock dividends. <br />Authorities also plan to expand short-selling opportunities for individual investors, as there's criticism that institutional investors mostly benefit from the system.<br /> Regulators plan to roll out the measures in phases from the third quarter of this year.<br />Oh Soo-young, Arirang News. <br />
