Hanwha Life Insurance said it has strengthened its information security system to better protect personal information of its customers.

The nation’s second-largest insurer said it has built a separate information storage system to keep its customers’ information for longer than five years when necessary.

Under the current law, a financial firm is obliged to delete all personal information of a customer within five years from the time the firm’s contract with the customer expires.

Exceptionally, however, the company can keep the information if some financial products -- often insurance policies -- require longer than five years of contract.

Since December, Hanwha Life Insurance has sought to separate customer information from the main internal system that processed all kinds of personal information. The information included not only names and social ID numbers but also trading information.

After a customer’s approval, only an employee specially designated by the company can get access to the personal information in the separate storage system, in case of a possible dispute, a company official said.

The insurer had completed coding personal information in 2013, three years before the law was enforced this year, which earned the company “ISO 27001,” an international information security standard.

By Kim Yoon-mi (yoonmi@heraldcorp.com)