BID TerminalOpen complete report
Research library

Back of Napkin

139130 139130

Three-pass checkedFresh as companies report

iM Financial Group trades at 0.51x book and about 6x trailing earnings two years after its bank subsidiary won Korea's first new nationwide banking charter in three decades, having cut its real-estate project-financing NPL ratio from 11.1% to 3.8% in a single year while pushing toward a 42% shareholder-return ratio and a record 12.27% CET1 ratio.

The setup turns on whether the first-half 2026 net-income decline and the drop in NPL coverage to 82.2% are normal noise on top of a genuinely repaired balance sheet, or an early tell that credit quality is turning again behind a capital ratio print that looks stronger than it is.

Key data

Sector / industryFinancial services / Banks
FYE / countryDec / South Korea (KRX)
Price · 52w range₩17,380 · ₩13,050–₩22,000
Market cap₩2.8T (≈$2.0B)
FY2025Net income ₩457.5B · EPS ₩2,823
Forward P/EFY26E 5.7x · FY27E 5.2x
P/B (trailing)0.51x
CET1 ratio12.27% (Q2 2026, record high)
ROE9.4% (H1 2026, annualized)
Dividend₩700/sh FY2025 (+40%) · 3.4% yield

The business

iM Financial Group is a Daegu-based bank holding company, formerly DGB Financial Group (renamed March 2025), built around iM Bank, formerly Daegu Bank, which in May 2024 became the first bank in 32 years to win a new nationwide banking charter, converting it from a regional lender into a nationwide competitor. The group also owns iM Securities (85.3% stake, 2018), iM Capital and iM Life. iM Bank carries the franchise: ₩245.7B of the group's ₩295.6B first-half net income, about 83% of the total.

What the print doesn't show is how much of the credit story is completed cleanup versus ongoing repair. The real-estate project-financing book, the source of heavy provisioning through 2023-2024, saw its NPL ratio fall from 11.1% at end-March 2025 to 3.8% at end-March 2026 as risk management tightened since the charter conversion. Bank-level quality is cleaner than the group average: iM Bank's delinquency ratio was 0.87% and NPL ratio 0.94% as of June 2026, versus 1.43% group-wide, the gap reflecting stress at the non-bank units that absorbed most PF exposure. Largest shareholder OK Financial Group holds a 9.99% stake just under the 10% ownership ceiling, a governance overhang covered below.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04The linchpins
  5. 05Closing
  6. 06Methodology

Continue with 139130

Get the complete Back of Napkin free.

Choose this as your free complete report. No card required.

Read the complete report

More company research

View all research
Wingstop Inc. WINGThey pay Michael Skipworth to grow adjusted profit and to open new restaurants, with nothing in the plan tied to the sales of the restaurants already open, which means he will keep the development machine at full speed through a demand slump, because franchisees fund the buildings and every opening pays the scoreboard twice. Proxy Report Wingstop Inc. WINGWingstop's franchise machine is still opening a restaurant nearly every day while the customers inside its existing restaurants quietly thin out. Moat Dive PJT Partners Inc. PJTPJT Partners grew a record second quarter 20% with all three of its engines, strategic advisory, private capital, and restructuring, rising at once, a combination the model was explicitly designed to produce. Back of Napkin Lazard Inc LAZLazard's asset-management arm just had its best half of inflows in roughly twenty years while its advisory arm shrank 9%, and the chief executive sold 125,000 shares two days ago. Back of Napkin