EBS 1TV to air Beyond Bank on Oct. 17 and 24, covering credit and loan rates

EBS 1TV will air the two-part economic documentary Beyond Bank at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 17 and Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026, examining how banking has changed and what individuals need to know about credit, DSR and loan rates.

Actor Kang Mal-geum narrates and presents the program, which follows banking from wooden tables 700 years ago to smartphone apps and institutions that read customers through their data. It explores the nature of finance and its transformation, framing banks as both nowhere and everywhere and offering guidance for a future in which money has disappeared.

The first episode, “The Bank Has Disappeared,” examines the origins of banks and the emergence of a credit-based society. The second, “The Bank Reads Me,” looks at the present and future of finance as data and technology reshape the industry.

The documentary places banking alongside radio sets, printed newspapers and encyclopedias, which it describes as having disappeared from everyday life within 30 years of the internet’s arrival. Bank branches and counters are dwindling, while judgments about whom to trust have increasingly become numerical.

Bill Gates predicted, “Banks are unnecessary. Only banking will remain.” Beyond Bank investigates how far that prediction has become reality and what individuals need to understand amid the changes.

Kang Mal-geum, who won at the Baeksang Arts Awards and the Blue Dragon Film Awards for Lucky Chan-sil and made a strong impression in The Good Bad Mother and When Life Gives You Tangerines, gives voice to the personal stories behind credit scores.

She also explains the complex calculations surrounding credit and interest rates, including DSR and the deposit protection system, in accessible language to convey practical principles for using banks. Her role as storyteller explores ordinary people’s feelings about money.

During filming, Kang Mal-geum expressed particular empathy for young borrowers, saying, “I was especially moved by the stories of young people starting their working lives with student loans.”

The first episode follows 700 years of banking history, tracing changing financial models from wooden tables to apps held in the palm of a hand. It examines how mathematician Edward Thorp’s card counting became a foundation for quantitative finance, alongside other pivotal moments that reveal unfamiliar aspects of an otherwise familiar institution.

Among those episodes is the collapse, during the Russian financial crisis the following year, of a hedge fund involving winners of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics. The program also traces the development of credit-scoring systems and examines how those numbers affect individual lives.

The second episode turns to banks’ use of customers’ payment records and behavioral data. It explores financial “psychological warfare,” in which a single button or phrase can change a decision, and the “debt trap” facing young people through student loans and revolving credit.

As banks become more sophisticated at reading their customers, the episode argues that customers also need to understand how banks and money work. Its focus is financial literacy: the knowledge needed to remain steady when making decisions about money.

The program covers the difference between advertised interest rates and actual returns, how to assess a bank’s safety, and ways to compare and manage loan interest rates. It also examines why people should hold cash-equivalent assets for a crisis, presenting these topics as basic financial principles for protecting their money.

Read the original (Korean)