Woori Bank has issued a second deposit product linked to the box office attendance of a South Korean movie, which was released 3 May.
The provider's Woori Cinema Time Deposit (Korea) 1 is a one-year product which closed earlier this month. It has a final coupon which will depend on the final audience numbers for the dramatisation of the first ever unified Korean table tennis team, where the women's team beat China at the 1991 World Table Tennis Championships in Chiba, Japan, called As One in English.
A coupon of 3.7% will be given if final attendance is below one million viewers and will increase to 3.8% if audience numbers breach that figure. A 3.9% coupon will be paid if attendance goes past two million and a 4% coupon will occur if there are more than three million viewers.
It is the South Korean bank's second product using movie attendance as an underlying after its Woori Cinema Time Deposit (My Way) paid out a coupon of 3.8% on top of capital to subscribers after the movie garnered more than one million viewers.
Woori Bank's product engineering department senior manager, Changsub Lee, compared the movie attendance-linked issues with insurance products since both were deposit products which had interest rates linked to the occurrence of a subsequent condition.
He said, "linking the number of the audience to the interest rate is part promotional because investors are given some power to control the probability of securing a higher interest rate," by encouraging fellow movie goers and watching the movie themselves - a goal shared by the film's producers.
Lee added rather than being a typical derivative product, it was a joint promotion between Woori and the movie’s producer which both wanted to increase their respective sales.