Amid controversy over Kakao Pay allegedly sharing personal credit information with Alipay without user consent, South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) has initiated an inspection of the overseas payment processing activities of Naver Pay and Toss.
On Aug. 18, financial industry sources revealed that the FSS has begun a document-based review of Naver Pay and Toss’s overseas payment processing operations. The FSS is examining whether unnecessary personal credit information was shared with third parties. If necessary, the FSS plans to conduct on-site inspections following the document review.
Earlier, the FSS discovered that Kakao Pay had provided Alipay with 54.2 billion pieces of personal credit information from 40.45 million Kakao accounts between April 2018 and recent months. This information included user IDs, phone numbers, email addresses, Kakao Pay registration details, and transaction histories (balances, top-ups, withdrawals, payments, and transfers).
The FSS believes that Kakao Pay shared this data without user consent, even for customers who did not use the overseas payment service. Additionally, it was found that Kakao Pay had unnecessarily shared around 550 million pieces of overseas payment-related credit information with Alipay over the past five years. According to the FSS, only order and payment details were necessary for transaction settlement with overseas merchants, not the full credit information that was provided.
