We explore how the rollout of Toss FacePay across major convenience‑store chains in Korea is reshaping customer attitudes toward facial‑recognition payments. Kyuin Oh, Toss Pay Leader, and Junho Choi, Technical Product Owner, share insights into the technology’s implementation, the psychological barriers it had to overcome, and how the fintech envisions the future of everyday transactions.
© Toss
Digitization continues to gain ground in today’s payment ecosystem, with chip cards, e‑wallets, and contactless‑enabled devices steadily reducing cash usage across markets. New players around the world are also broadening the range of alternative platforms and methods aimed at making everyday spending faster and more seamless, as transactions remain a central pillar of the fintech sector.
This is where biometric authorization, already familiar to consumers for device unlocks, faces a steep climb as it moves into payments. Although already viable in this sector, its higher complexity and lingering consumer hesitation have made adoption challenging and slowed its path toward becoming a feasible alternative for retailers. Yet emerging cases suggest that this technology can gain traction under the right conditions.
One standout example is Toss in Korea, a 30‑million‑user app already deploying its FacePay service across major convenience store brands. After completing its pilot phase last September, the company now aims to reach one million acceptance points by the end of 2026.
Finance meets convenience
What began as a peer‑to‑peer money transfer service in 2015 has grown into a full‑scale financial app. Toss offers banking, investments, credit management, authentication, tax services, loan comparison, and insurance through a single interface, serving over 60% of Korea’s population. Expanding into offline payments, the company is building an integrated ecosystem whose latest addition, FacePay, enables users to pay with facial recognition and is already available across leading c-store chains such as 7‑Eleven, CU, and GS25.
Kyuin Oh, Toss Pay Leader
“We deliberately prioritized places people visit often and can find easily so customers could encounter and adopt a new payment method naturally, without the need for additional explanation,” explains Kyuin Oh, Toss Pay Leader. For the company, this sector represents a key opportunity thanks to its broad and diverse audience, drawing customers of all ages, and its emphasis on speed, a core value that aligns with the frictionless aspect of biometrics.
However, targeting a mass audience requires nurturing customers and addressing adoption challenges. “The biggest challenge was not the technology itself, but the psychological barrier users initially felt toward facial recognition as a payment method,” adds Oh. To overcome this hesitation, Toss adopted a more proactive, hands‑on approach: rather than relying on technical explanations, it encouraged users to experience the technology directly for themselves.
Turning caution into confidence
This experience‑driven approach aims not only to help customers familiarize themselves with the system in a more intuitive way but also to address the data‑sensitivity concerns often associated with biometric information. Although e‑wallets and QR‑based payments are more commonly adopted, partly because biometric data in those cases remains tied to personal devices, the real challenge for Toss lies in making facial recognition feel just as safe and familiar to users.
Junho Choi, Technical Product Owner at Toss
“All facial data and other personal information are stored and managed exclusively in encrypted form and are used only within the scope of user consent,” details Junho Choi, Technical Product Owner at Toss. He emphasizes security as “foundational” since the service’s inception, noting that the system also allows for re‑registration to address significant changes in appearance and ensure a smooth user experience.
FacePay is the only facial recognition payment service in Korea to have passed the Personal Information Protection Commission’s preliminary adequacy review. In addition, the company continuously monitors data processing and implements proactive risk‑management measures to safeguard biometric information. Proactive engagement may help ease users into adoption, but robust security can ultimately build trust.
The reality check
Frictionless experiences may have been hailed as one of the major innovations of the past years, boosted further by the pandemic. But the inability of major technologies to genuinely integrate into customers’ everyday journeys reflected a decline that has been unfolding for years. For Choi, although interest on full automation “may have shifted away,” he understands customers still demand for effective services that can reduce friction.
“Customers are choosing services not for the novelty of the technology, but for how naturally it improves existing behaviors,” he explains. Toss designed FacePay with this in mind, prioritizing seamless integration into everyday routines and focusing on proving it could deliver greater convenience than existing payment methods. According to the company, this approach is paying off: FacePay has recorded a one‑month repeat‑usage rate of around 60%, driven largely by low‑ticket, high‑frequency purchases, an area where c-stores play a central role.
This highlights that speed is one of the main drivers behind implementing biometric authentication for payments. With research showing that biometrics can complete checkouts in under one second, and the Korean fintech confident that the technology can operate without disrupting existing workflows, the path toward broader adoption may increasingly appear straightforward.
© Toss
A blueprint in the making
The success of FacePay in Korea is not a coincidence. The market’s reputation for tech‑savvy consumers and its strong sense of cultural momentum align with consistent government support. Retailers are also known for capitalizing on this notion, with dedicated formats and offers that serve not only as testing grounds for new innovations but also as a way to measure customer response.
On the tech side, Toss’s position as an all‑encompassing platform for everyday life enables true full‑scale deployment. Managing complexity is easier when services are delivered through a single, holistic ecosystem. By contrast, fragmented environments, common across independent fuel retailers or convenience stores, create an entirely different scenario.
Technical complexity quickly increases making the solution far more challenging to scale commercially. Even so, the current trajectory hints at a path in the making, one that may not be definitive yet, but brings mainstream biometric adoption closer.
Since its official launch last September, FacePay has surpassed 2 million registered users in roughly five months. In parallel, Toss Place, the company’s payment‑terminal manufacturer, has partnered with GS Caltex to deploy POS solutions across its fuel retail network, with the introduction of FacePay at service stations currently under evaluation. If this pace continues and usage deepens, it may signal the start of a new trajectory for the Asian market, one that other international players with similar scale could eventually look to replicate.
Written by Gonzalo Solanot
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