Hana Financial Group is moving beyond fixed desks and Ethernet ports at its new headquarters in Incheon, South Korea.
SK Telecom, Hana Financial Group, and Samsung Electronics said Sept. 28 that a private 5G smart office is now operating across 16 floors of the Cheongna headquarters. The network is designed to serve about 3,000 employees across 10 Hana affiliates as they move into the building.
The companies call it Korea’s first private 5G smart office in the financial sector. Private 5G is already used in industrial and enterprise environments, but large office deployments are less common, especially in banking, where mobility has to coexist with strict identity, security, and network-separation requirements.
How Hana’s private 5G network works
Employees can use 5G-enabled laptops, tablets, and other work devices from desks, meeting rooms, and collaboration areas instead of relying on assigned Ethernet connections. SK Telecom says the network covers work and common areas from the first basement level through the 15th floor and connects with Hana’s existing work network and administrative services.
Samsung is the project’s sole private 5G network vendor, supplying radios, baseband equipment, and a cloud-native 5G standalone core. The system runs on 4.7 GHz spectrum dedicated to private 5G in Korea rather than Hana relying on a public mobile network for office connectivity.
Site-level testing still matters for wireless deployments: recent mobile-network testing found that national 5G results cannot predict indoor performance at an individual office or facility.
Security is built around authenticated devices, encryption, and network separation. Registered users and work devices connect through USIM-based authentication, while the 5G radio segment and subscriber information are encrypted. SK Telecom also lists firewalls, DDoS defenses, and access controls.
The standalone core supports network slicing, allowing Hana affiliates to operate separate logical environments with policies tailored to their business and security requirements. SK Telecom says the deployment also uses physical network separation, although the public announcements do not detail which components are physically isolated.
Why private 5G fits a regulated bank
South Korea’s financial sector has long operated under network-separation requirements intended to isolate internal systems from external networks. The Financial Services Commission revised those rules on April 20, allowing qualifying SaaS applications on internal networks without separate regulatory-sandbox approval if firms meet additional security requirements.
Regulated organizations are also pursuing tighter isolation in AI infrastructure. Google’s air-gapped Gemini deployment for regulated organizations similarly emphasizes isolation, access controls, and auditability for sensitive workloads.
SK Telecom designed Hana’s network to support future workplace AI services, smart-building systems, intelligent access control, AI-enabled CCTV, and mobile employee IDs. As automated services expand, enterprise AI is also creating more machine identities that organizations may need to govern alongside employee accounts and devices.
A centralized management system monitors network use and outages. The companies describe the AI and smart-building functions as future integrations rather than services already deployed across the headquarters.
The announcements do not disclose project cost or publish latency, throughput, reliability, or performance comparisons with enterprise Wi-Fi or wired networking. Without those figures, Hana cannot yet serve as a direct purchasing benchmark; wider office adoption will depend on whether private 5G’s security and mobility benefits justify its added infrastructure and operational complexity.
Also read: South Korea’s network-security push is extending into AI as well, with regulators drafting security rules for autonomous AI agents covering access controls, audit logs, shutdown mechanisms, and human oversight.