SK Telecom and Samsung Electronics have deployed a private 5G network across Hana Financial Group's new headquarters in Incheon, South Korea, covering 16 floors and serving thousands of employees across several of the financial group's affiliates.

The installation, described by Samsung as a smart office set-up, is expected to form the technical foundation for Hana Financial Group's broader AI transformation programme.

Under the arrangement, each of Hana's subsidiaries will operate on a separate network slice, giving them what Samsung called "independent operating environments tailored to individual security policies and business needs". The slice-level separation allows affiliates sharing the same physical infrastructure to maintain distinct security postures — a requirement that shaped the project's design.

Samsung supplied the full radio access and core stack: its radios, baseband and a cloud-native core, all running on mid-band spectrum that South Korean regulators have dedicated specifically to private 5G networks. That spectrum allocation is a distinguishing feature of the Korean market, where enterprises can licence local 5G frequencies rather than relying exclusively on operator-shared public network arrangements.

The choice of private 5G over Wi-Fi was driven by the security profile of financial services. Samsung pointed to the highly sensitive data processed by financial institutions and "strict network-separation requirements", noting Wi-Fi was "largely off-limits over security concerns and cyber risks". In practice, that meant a cellular solution was the only viable route to ubiquitous in-building connectivity for Hana's staff.

The security architecture deployed includes encryption, firewalls, protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks and USIM-based authentication. The USIM element restricts network access exclusively to authorised devices and users, closing off the open-access exposure that makes Wi-Fi problematic for regulated financial environments.

SK Telecom framed the deployment as a template for the wider financial sector. Kim Goo-young, head of the operator's enterprise business office, said "for AI and data to be used widely in day-to-day work, employees need a network that gives them secure, reliable access to internal systems and data from anywhere". He added the installation is "a leading example" of how SK Telecom's technologies can support financial industry customers.

The commercial logic is straightforward for both vendors. For SK Telecom, enterprise private networks diversify revenue beyond a saturated consumer mobile market, and financial services — with its combination of deep budgets and demanding security mandates — is a natural target segment. For Samsung's networks division, the Hana deal is a reference win in a market where domestic rivals including Ericsson-supplied and Nokia-supplied operators compete for private 5G contracts, and it demonstrates the Korean vendor's ability to sell an end-to-end stack from radio to cloud-native core.

Samsung's characterisation of the project as the foundation for AI transformation is a vendor framing, and the source gives no detail on which AI workloads or applications Hana plans to run over the network. What the deployment does deliver concretely is secure, device-authenticated wireless access to internal systems across the headquarters — the connectivity precondition Kim described for widespread enterprise AI and data use.

The partnership aligns with SK Telecom's stated enterprise strategy of positioning itself as an AI infrastructure provider rather than a pure connectivity supplier, with the Hana deployment cited as evidence of that positioning in the financial vertical.

SK Telecom indicated it views the Incheon installation as a replicable model, describing it as a leading example for the financial sector — suggesting further deployments of the same architecture across Korean financial institutions are the operator's next commercial target.