Household loans extended by South Korean insurers kept their growth trend in November as people continued to increase their dependence on insurance firms for mortgage loans, data by the financial watchdog showed Wednesday.

Debts owed by households to life and non-life insurers reached 75.1 trillion won (70.9 billion U.S. dollars) as of the end of November, up 0.36 percent from a month earlier, according to the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS).

South Korean households raised their dependence on insurers for home-backed loans after the financial regulator tightened rules on banks'household lending. The regulator introduced comprehensive countermeasures against excessive household debts in the banking sector in June 2011, boosting shift of loan demand from banks to non-bank financial institutions such as insurers.

Insurance contract loans, which take refund on the contract cancellation as collateral, expanded 0.9 percent on-month to 46.3 trillion won. Home-backed loans declined 0.96 percent to 22.3 trillion won, but the figure, including the so-called conforming loans, jumped 2 percent in November from a month before.

Conforming loans are those extended by depository corporations that can be transferred to the Korea Housing Finance Corp.(KHFC). The state-run agency buys the loans from insurers to securitize them as mortgage-backed securities (MBS). The securitization is viewed as positive because it can boost long-term, fixed-rate mortgage loans that the regulator seeks to lift.

The ratio of household loans overdue for more than one month came in at 0.56 percent of the total as of end-November, up 0.02 percentage point from the previous month, according to the FSS.

The watchdog said household loans were mostly operated by insurers with insurance contract loans that have contract- cancellation refunds as collateral, resulting in a decrease in the probability of becoming sour.

The FSS, however, cautioned that the delinquency ratio for household loans was increasingly higher, saying that it will strengthen monitoring of such loans.

Meanwhile, corporate loans by insurers amounted to 34.6 trillion won at the end of November, down 0.81 percent from the prior month, according to the FSS.

The delinquency ratio for corporate loans stood at 1.45 percent as of end-November, up 0.06 percentage point from a month before.