K-Walk Partners Intensifies Global Market Push with Foreigner-Focused Services

K-Work Partners is innovatively improving the convenience of daily life and financial accessibility for foreigners residing in Korea and visitors, thereby helping them settle in the Korean market and presenting a global vision. The company currently operates three core services that encompass the overall life of foreigners in Korea. ▲ 'K-Start', a comprehensive lifestyle support platform for foreigners, provides community, daily life support, and commerce functions to help international students and workers settle, and plans to expand to include employment support services within the first half of this year. ▲ 'K-Exchange' is an O2O currency exchange platform that provides convenient financial accessibility through an accommodation delivery service and unmanned currency exchange machines. Starting with its first branch in Hongdae in May 2023, it currently operates 5 direct branches and aims to expand to 30 branches nationwide this year. ▲ 'Bank Partner' provides financial product information such as deposits, savings, loans, and insurance to foreigners residing in Korea in their native languages. Through partnerships with financial institutions, it plans to expand beyond product comparison and subscription guidance to include financial education content in the future. K-Work Partners was selected for the 2024 TIPS program upon recommendation from the Chungnam Center for Creative Economy & Innovation, being recognized for its technology and market potential, and successfully attracted investments from entities such as KAIST Venture Investment Holdings. CEO Jo Seong-gon emphasized the importance of the influx and coexistence of foreigners in an era of low birth rates and an aging population as the background for the company's founding, and cited 'an integrated platform that considers the entire life cycle of foreigners' as the company's unique strength. He explained that communication in native languages and settlement support through K-Start, convenient currency exchange services through K-Exchange, and Bank Partner's provision of Korean financial products based on these form an organic virtuous cycle. In the future, K-Work Partners plans to accelerate its entry into the global market, beyond enhancing the functionality of each service and expanding user accessibility. Specifically, K-Exchange will enter the prepaid card business through partnerships with Payco and Danal, and in the second half of this year, it plans to integrate its currency exchange centers, prepaid card, and unmanned currency exchange machine businesses into a unified solution to actively target the Japanese market.