The banking industry in Korea had majorly dominated remittance services in South Korea before 2017. The new regulation that came into effect in 2017 granted non-banking institutions access to a slice of the $33 billion pie.

This resulted in the launching of Coinone Transfer which was a brainchild of the SBI Ripple Asia partnership. This was a strategic partnership between RippleNet and SBI holdings to give birth to South Korea’s first remittance service that was supported by Blockchain.

Migrant Workers in South Korea

Their scope would at the moment focus on foreigners who work in South Korea and yet have to send money to their families. Cross border money transfers proved to a timeous process as Camille Jeong, Business Development Manager at Coinone explained. They had to physically visit bank brick and mortar premises, marking the beginning of the long and expensive process where they had to queue to fill in paperwork and wait for as long as one week for payments to reflect on destination accounts. This was especially harder for those working in rural setups.

The unique partnership also gave SBI access to RippleNet’s wide array of partners located in Thailand, Philippines, and Sri Lanka in their fold. This resulted in lower operational costs and thus translated to transfer fees lower than 1%. Jeong explained that this also trimmed the transactional period as they were in real-time.

They then embarked on a marketing spree to convince the people to use their platform. This they achieved by using three animated characters that would represent their remittance superheroes as Jeong cited. The response from the market was massive as their transaction volumes have grown by 50% monthly since. They also enjoyed up to 80% client retention rates meaning they got a lot of repeat business from satisfied clients.

Korean Students Studying Abroad Next

Notably, they now want to zero in on another type of clientele that also relies heavily on cross border money transfers. Parents based in South Korea whose kids study abroad and have to rely on money transfers to pay for school tuition and upkeep as highlighted by Jeong. Coinone would be able to offer reliable remittance services across the globe in the US, UK, Hong Kong, and even Singapore