UPDATE 3-South Korea's Yoon calls on banks, telecomms to help ease cost of living

(Adds Seoul City delaying transport fare raise) By Choonsik Yoo SEOUL, Feb 15 (Reuters) - South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol on Wednesday ordered steps to boost competition in the banking and communication service sectors while calling on those businesses to help curb soaring costs for the most vulnerable people. "I think private-sector players need to voluntarily join efforts to share the pain by helping keep prices stable," Yoon said at a meeting with economic ministers, highlighting the role banks and communications services could play. He also asked provincial governments to refrain from raising utility charges, or spread out the pain of higher bills over time, given expectations that economic hardship will be worse in the first half of the year than the second. Soon after his request, the government of the capital, Seoul, said it would postpone a public transport fare increase planned for the first half of the year until the second. Around half of South Korea's population lives or works in Seoul and its surrounding cities. The central government said separately it would launch a task force this month to study ways to improve business practices at banks amid concerns in the media about their big profits and generous retirement payouts. The government said in a statement the task force would draw up measures by the end of June to boost competition, improve compensation schemes, strengthen loss-absorbing capability and reduce reliance on interest income in the banking sector. Comprising financial regulators, banks, scholars, legal experts and consumer groups, the task force will also aim to come up with ways to expand fixed-rate lending and increase banks' contribution to society, it said. South Korea has 20 domestically incorporated banks and 35 branches of foreign banks, but business has been dominated by a handful. Banks have frequently been criticised by the media for making unfairly large profits by raising interest rates. In recent weeks, media also reported that some banks had paid people hundreds of millions of won (hundreds of thousands of dollars) as compensation for early retirement. The government in its statement offered no new plan to introduce more competition among mobile phone services, a sector also dominated by a handful of providers. (Reporting by Choonsik Yoo; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Sonali Paul)