Toss Bank adds online service for foreign customers

Toss Bank, a web-based bank in South Korea, has added a service exclusive to foreign customers. The company will now allow all foreign nationals residing in the country to open their bank accounts with them online.

Foreign residents in South Korea will be able to open their accounts without the need to visit Toss Bank’s offline branch. This new service extended for foreigners was announced by the company on Monday, May 2.

As per The Korea Times, the bank is making this move to eliminate the inconvenience for foreign customers who want to open an account with them since they were normally required to go to an offline branch to do this.

With the exclusive feature, ex-pats in S. Korea who are also registered residents can now easily open an account with Toss Bank via online. Those who have not yet opened an account with any Korean bank can also open one at Toss Bank.

"Although the number of foreign nationals residing in Korea now reaches about 1.96 million, banking services for them have been pretty much limited, and many of them were alienated from the country's financial system," an official at Toss Bank said in a statement. "The bank aims to continue to embrace customers who haven't fully enjoyed banking services."

In any case, the bank said that it will be using data from the government to validate the identity of the foreigners who will open an account. Also, Toss Bank is requiring applicants to scan their registration cards online as part of the online process of opening an account. The company added that all the information on the applicants’ cards must match with the data from the government, The Korea Herald reported.

Finally, Toss Bank is also rolling out its international money transfer service soon, and before this, it will be reaching out to foreigners who are having a hard time getting the services they want and need due to language barriers since most of the banks’ mobile apps are released in Korean only. This issue will be solved by Toss by upgrading its own app to include foreign languages.