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Toss records first profitable month five year after launch

Toss records first profitable month five year after launch

Posted May. 08, 2020 07:44,   

Updated May. 08, 2020 07:44

한국어

Viva Republica’s mobile finance platform “Toss” with 17 million members has recorded the first profitable month in April since its launch five years ago, the company announced on Thursday. The profits have not been revealed, but the service’s monthly sales in April was approximately 14 billion won, which is a lot higher than last year’s average monthly sales of 9.8 billion won, raising the potential to record annual profits for the first time.

Since its launch in 2015, the annual sales of Toss have gone up from 3.4 billion won in 2016 to 118.7 billion won last year, which is a very rapid growth of 3,500 percent in just three years. The number of executives and staff also more than doubled from 180 at the beginning of last year to over 400 as of last month.

Toss’s growth is faster than global fintech companies overseas. Especially in the case of its main service of easy money transfer, the service reached the 10-trillion-won mark in accumulated remittances in just three years while Venmo in the U.S. took seven years to reach the milestone. As of now, monthly remittances through Toss stand at 4.5 trillion won with the accumulated remittances of 90 trillion won.

The fintech industry has high expectations that Toss’s profitability improvement will become more noticeable as mobile platform-based financial business models do not incur a substantial increase in costs even when sales go up.

Toss is planning to strengthen its own platform while expanding its business areas to Internet-only bank services, stock, and payment gateway to quickly obtain leadership across the overall mobile financial industry. The market size is estimated to be 52 trillion won, according to Toss.

“This year, the domestic financial industry’s switch to online untact services will become accelerated,” said CEO of Viva Republica Lee Seung-geon. “Given the industry trend, Toss is expected to experience greater profit growth.”


zion37@donga.com