KakaoPay is planning to start its cross-border payment service in Japan starting from 2019 and it is also going to introduce ‘KakaoPay investment’ service by working with P2P companies.
KakaoPay held a press conference at The Plaza Hotel on the 19th and announced that it will develop itself into a comprehensive daily financial platform.
“13 million people used KakaoPay last month and its monthly turnover surpassed $887 million (1 trillion KRW) and $2.04 billion (2.3 trillion KRW) in March and October respectively.” said CEO Ryu Young-joon of KakaoPay. “We are going to become a daily financial platform for every person in South Korea that deals with wire transfer, cross-border payment, and investment through payment gateway.”
KakaoPay has chosen Japan as the first country where its cross-border payment service will be launched as Japan is preparing for 2020 Tokyo Olympics and is working on expanding simple payment services.
KakaoPay users can still make payments without having to exchange their money in Japan. Foreign tourists who visit South Korea can also make payments at offline franchise stores. KakaoPay designed QR codes and barcodes while it was planning cross-border service.
“Chinese tourists use simple payment services in South Korea and we are also going to make KakaoPay payments available in Japan for South Korean tourists starting from the first quarter of 2019.” said CEO Ryu Young-joon. “We are going to eventually expand our cross-border service to China and South-East Asian countries in the future.”
CEO Ryu also talked about possibility of participating in ‘Zero Pay’ project that is being pushed by Ministry of SMEs and Startups and Seoul-si. He hinted that KakaoPay may participate in actual project of ‘Zero Pay’.
“We have decided not to participate in a pilot project of ‘Zero Pay’ since we are going to have 200,000 franchise stores with our QR codes by end of this year and we were not certain how our services will be if we were to participate in this pilot project.” said CEO Ryu. “We are currently having discussions with Ministry of SMEs and Startups and we are looking into how we are going to participate in Zero Pay project.”
On this same day, KakaoPay also introduce a roadmap for ‘KakaoPay investment’ service that allows its users to easily make investments through KakaoTalk. Starting from the 20th, KakaoPay is going to gather people who are involved in products with medium-profit and medium-risk. Its investment service allows people to make minimum investment of $8.87 (10,000 KRW) and guarantees about 10% profit ratio. People can select 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, or 12 months as their maturity dates.
KakaoPay is going to introduce personal credit, mortgage loan, and sales credit loan services with People Fund. It is going to support products from People Fund and expand its support to other partners sequentially. KakaoPay emphasized that its investment service is different from that of Toss or SamsungPay since it has been participating in its investment service ever since it was being designed.
It is expected that synergy from acquiring Baro Investment & Securities will exhibit its potential in 2019. KakaoPay is saying that it will be able to expand its ‘KakaoPay investment’ service to stock and bond investment and CMA (Cash Management Account) once its acquisition is evaluated by financial authorities. It also needs time to establish MTS (Mobile Trading System) that was not available by Baro Investment & Securities.
“Stock and bond investment service will be based on a new method rather than transactions.” said Senior Manager Oh Yong-taek of KakaoPay who is responsible for ‘KakaoPay investment’ service.
Staff Reporter Ham, Jihyun | goham@etnews.com