A new class of wealthy citizens are currently fueling changes within the North Korean economy, leading to the creation of unofficial financial services, an international panel of experts said today at a conference in Seoul.

Speaking at the “Doing Business in North Korea: Business and Finance in the DPRK” hosted by the Institute for Far Eastern Studies (IFES), the experts concluded that looser controls on private capital were creating a new class of rich North Koreans, called  donju (money masters).

“There is a booming industry of private finance in North Korea,” Andrai Lankov of Seoul’s Kookmin University said at the