South Korea Says Exchange Ownership Cap Not Aimed at Specific Firms

The framing matters more than the rule itself: Seoul is signaling that exchanges are being reclassified from registrants to infrastructure, which shifts the regulatory question from who owns them to what obligations follow from that status. The three-year renewal cycle becoming a licensing regime is the concrete change worth tracking, since licensing typically brings capital, governance and fit-and-proper tests that ownership caps alone do not capture. Whether the cap survives the legislative process, and how it is applied to existing shareholders, is the open question.