Photo: BNK Busan Bank releases the baseball-themed term loan. Credit: BNK Busan Bank.
This year’s Korea Baseball Organization championship games began on October 26 with Seoul LG Twins taking an early 2-0 lead over the Daejeon Hanwha Eagles. It is a vindication for two long-suffering teams: the Twins are returning to the Korean Series after winning their first championship in 29 years in 2023, while the Eagles, who last made it to the Korean Series in 2006, have not won the title since 1999.
The unexpected success of the two hard-luck teams leaves just one perennial bottom-dweller in the KBO basement: the Busan Lotte Giants, known for their rabid fans based in South Korea’s second largest city. The Giants last won a championship with their last appearance in the Korean Series, in 1999, making them the only KBO club not to make it to the championships within this century. Even the Changwon NC Dinos, an expansion team established in 2011, made it to the Korean Series twice - in 2016 and 2020 - and secured a championship the second time around.
Giants fans are getting increasingly desperate. For the last eight years, BNK Busan Bank BNK 부산은행 - a local bank owned partly by Giants’ corporate sponsor, Lotte Group 롯데그룹 - has offered a promotion called “Fall Baseball Term Deposit 가을야구 정기예금”, promising increased interest rates of up to 0.4% if the Giants made the playoffs by finishing in the top half of the 10-team KBO league. The promotion has inspired Giants fans to deposit more than KRW 5.3t (USD 3.7b) since it first launched - and has never once paid out.
In the face of mounting criticism that the terms of the promotion made payouts impossible, Busan Bank changed the terms this year to offer a bonus interest rate of 0.05% if the Giants won more than 70 games out of the 144-game season, and another 0.05% if the Giants won more than 80 games. It was to no avail: the Giants finished the 2025 season with 66 wins, once again denying fans a financial windfall.
THAT’S IT FOR THE FOURTH WEEK OF
