Toss gets lift from biometric retail payments, plans 2026 US IPO

Retail payments with face biometrics are growing in South Korea, and could help lift one of the country’s leading providers of the technology to a major U.S. IPO.

South Korean fintech app Toss surpassed 30 million users last July, approaching 60 percent of the country’s population, The Korea Herald reports, though 24 million of them are considered active monthly users. One million of them are signed up for Facepay, the app’s facial recognition payment service, according to Nikkei Asia.

Cashless payments are very popular in South Korea, making up ninety-nine percent of all payments in the country as of 2023.

The Toss app also provides identity verification and a variety of financial services.

Cafes, stores and gyms are among 240,000 businesses currently offer biometric payments through Facepay, and the company has previously stated its goal to deploy the service in a million stores by the end of 2026.

Now the company is planning to list its stock on a U.S. exchange, Reuters reports, possibly with a second-quarter 2026 IPO at a valuation above $10 billion. The valuation could even rise as high as $15 billion, a source told the publication, raising between $2 billion and $3 billion.

Toss reported profits of 90.7 billion won (approximately US$63 million) last year, its first profitable year, on 1.96 trillion won ($1.4 billion) in revenue.

The app works with biometric point-of-sale devices, which perform 3D face biometrics matching and liveness detection. The latter process includes detection of blinking and subtle movement, Nikkei reports. App operator Viva Republica told Biometric Update in an email that its  liveness detection is currently going through third-party testing to confirm its compliance with the ISO/IEC 30107-3 presentation attack detection (PAD) standard by Korea’s Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA).

Toss signed a deal with domestic biometrics provider Alchera in 2023 to integrate its remote identity verification capabilities. Alchera passed Level 1 PAD assessments from iBeta in 2022 and 2024.

This post was updated at 10:02am Eastern on January 30, 2026 to include information from Viva Republica about the current status of its testing for ISO PAD standard conformance.

Article Topics

biometric liveness detection  |  biometric payments  |  biometrics  |  consumer adoption  |  face biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  IPO  |  retail biometrics  |  South Korea  |  Toss