The delinquency ratio of South Korean insurance companies held steady in October from a month earlier, as the firms managed to curb growth in most of their bad loans, the financial regulator said Sunday.

The bad-loan ratio of life and nonlife insurers stood at 0.69 percent in October, unchanged from the previous month, according to the Financial Supervisory Service.

A delinquent insurance loan refers to a debt that has been overdue in both the principal and interest for more than a month.

The regulator cited the unchanged overdue ratio of bad household loans, which came in at 0.53 percent in October, the same as the previous month’s tally.

Also, a slight drop in the delinquency ratio of corporate debts lent support to keeping the overall bad loan ratio flat, the FSS added.

The overdue loan ratio of property financing, the troubled sector with the highest bad loan figure, declined 0.16 percentage point to 5.5 percent as of end-October. (Yonhap News)