Chapter 1. Choosing the collection route.

You don't choose the provider first, because two decisions come before it. The first names the entity that will invoice the Japanese or Korean buyer. The second sets the payment methods that entity must support. Together, they eliminate half the providers before the first meeting, and they expose a foreign brand to an asymmetry that nothing offsets. In Japan, cards can be accepted from abroad and everything else requires a local partner. In Korea, no domestic transaction is processed without a local contract.

The order in which to make the decisions

Question 1

Do you sell online, in store, or both?

In-store sales require certified hardware in Japan and a VAN contract in Korea. Neither project can be handled from an international PSP's dashboard.

Question 2

Will you invoice from a local entity?

Without a Japanese entity, PayPay, konbini payments, and deferred payment are hard to contract for directly. Without a Korean entity, the first question for the PG is who is eligible to sign the contract, and only then the rate.

Question 3

Are your buyers residents or visitors?

Visitors pay with international cards and QR gateways. Residents expect PayPay and konbini in Japan, and Naver Pay and Kakao Pay in Korea.

Question 4

Which currency do you want to receive?

Yen settles easily outside Japan. The won does not trade freely outside Korea, so negotiate the cross-border payout with the provider from the start.

Decision

Lock in the route, then approach providers

Each route has its own set of providers. An acquirer that excels at Japanese cards may be unable to support konbini, and a Korean PG may turn down a counterparty with no local entity.

Route	What it covers in Japan	What it covers in Korea	What it doesn't cover
International PSP, no local entity	Visa, Mastercard, and JCB cards in e-commerce, with EMV 3-D Secure	Foreign cards used on your site; no domestic transactions	PayPay direct, konbini, deferred payment, FeliCa in store, Korean domestic cards
Local entity + domestic providers	The full matrix: cards, PayPay, konbini, deferred payment, FeliCa e-money	PG contract online, VAN contract in store, 간편지급 (simple payment) wallets	Nothing blocking on the payments side; incorporation lead time and local obligations become the issue
Local marketplace	The platform collects payments and pays out net of its commission	The platform collects payments, often through Naver Pay	The customer relationship, the payment data, control over the rate, and reusable tokens

Three acceptance routes, and what each one leaves out of reach

Learn the Korean vocabulary right away. An online merchant is not the card company's affiliated merchant but the sub-merchant (하위가맹점) of its PG, which holds the affiliation itself. That position is more than a legal detail. The Financial Services Commission counts 1.938 million PG sub-merchants out of 2.082 million merchants, or 93.1%, and applies them the same fee schedule as direct merchants (FSC press release, February 12, 2026). Your rate therefore depends on your Korean revenue, not on your bargaining power.

⚠️

An international acquiring contract produces no Korean domestic transactions

A Korean card with a Visa or Mastercard logo does not run on those networks' rails for a purchase in Korea. The authorization goes to the issuing card company, through the VAN layer for in-person payments or through the PG online. The international logo is used only for purchases made outside Korea. A foreign acquirer that promises to process Korean domestic transactions under its existing contract is describing a market that doesn't exist. To check, ask for the name of the PG or VAN that will hold the affiliation.

Who is eligible to contract with the provider: a local company, a branch, or a foreign entity accepted under conditions
Which parts of the flow it actually handles: authorization, batch submission, payout, disputes, partial refunds
Which payment methods are in the contract, and which require a separate agreement with a third party
What payout delay and settlement currency apply, and which conversion method is used
How portable card tokens and mandates are if you switch providers
What service commitment applies when a national rail goes down, covered in chapter 7

🎯 Quick question

A European brand signs with its usual acquirer and announces that it accepts Korean cards in Korea. What will happen?

Chapter 2. Japan's card foundation: JCB, qualification, and true cost.

Cards remain Japan's leading payment instrument, with 82.7% of cashless payments in 2025, or JPY 134.6 trillion out of 162.7 trillion (METI, published March 31, 2026). An acceptance lineup that leaves out JCB therefore gives up part of the customer base. JCB Co., Ltd. claims more than 175 million cardholders and about 71 million merchants in 195 countries and territories (JCB, 2025). Outside Asia, its acceptance relies largely on its reciprocal alliance with Discover Global Network: in practice, a JCB card used in the US runs on the Discover network.

The brands your Japanese acceptance matrix must coverJCJCBVisaMastercardQUQUICPayIDiD

Category	Classic	Gold	Platinum / Commercial / Rewards	Infinite
General / Other: the default category	2,28	2,38	2,58	2,88
Non-Qualified: transaction that fails qualification	2,68	2,78	2,98	3,28
Large Retail & Hotels	1,85	1,95	2,15	2,45
Wallet Funding	1,65	1,75	1,95	2,25
Airlines	1,10	1,20	1,40	1,70
Recurring / Everyday Small / Small Ticket	0,90	1,00	1,20	1,20
Utility and Gov't/Public Service	0,60	0,70	0,90	0,90
Tokenized Transit Wallet	0,50	0,50	0,50	0,50
B2B Platform Program	0,50	0,50	0,50	0,50

Japanese domestic interchange published by Visa for credit cards, as a percentage of the transaction amount (Visa, “Visa Domestic Credit Interchange Rates,” visa.co.jp, accessed in 2026)

🔑

Forty basis points separate a qualified transaction from a sloppy one

The gap between General / Other and Non-Qualified is 0.40 percentage points across the entire product range. The non-qualified category penalizes a transaction that fails the timing, authorization, or data completeness criteria. It is not an exceptional penalty: it applies by default whenever an integration is misconfigured. With an average order of JPY 12,000 and 300,000 transactions a year, the gap comes to JPY 14.4 million. Start tracking your qualified share at launch, not after the first annual statement.

This audit has only recently become possible. On November 30, 2022, the Japan Fair Trade Commission announced that Visa, Mastercard, and UnionPay would publish their standard Japanese interchange rates. The announcement followed its April 2022 report, which recommended publication to give merchants leverage in negotiations. A payments manager therefore knows the floor of their cost. The merchant fee breaks down into three blocks: published interchange, network fees, and the provider's margin. Any statement line that belongs to none of the three can be challenged.

Breaking down a Japanese acceptance cost before you negotiate

Assumptions: JPY 12,000 order, Visa Gold card, e-commerce, General/Other category

  Published interchange (Gold, General/Other)   2.38%    ->  JPY 285.6
  Network fees                                  ask the provider
  Provider margin                               ask the provider
  --------------------------------------------------------------------
  Merchant fee charged                          X%       ->  to reconcile

Same order, transaction downgraded to Non-Qualified (Gold)

  Published interchange                         2.78%    ->  JPY 333.6
  Extra cost per transaction                    0.40 pt  ->  JPY 48.0
  Over 300,000 transactions a year                       ->  JPY 14,400,000

Check to automate: share of qualified transactions, by month and by product.
A drift in that share always comes before a drift in the average merchant fee.

⚠️

EMV 3-D Secure is no longer optional in Japanese e-commerce

The クレジットカード・セキュリティガイドライン (Credit Card Security Guidelines), published by the クレジット取引セキュリティ対策協議会, whose secretariat is run by the 日本クレジット協会 (Japan Consumer Credit Association), requires online merchants to deploy EMV 3-D Secure, with a deadline of the end of March 2025. The current version is 6.1, with a dedicated implementation guide. The legal framework is the 割賦販売法 (Installment Sales Act), amended in 2018, which requires affiliated merchants either not to store card data or to be PCI DSS compliant. A merchant launching in Japan today goes live with 3-D Secure or doesn't go live.

🎯 Quick question

Your Japanese statement shows the average merchant fee rising while your card mix hasn't changed. What should you check first?

Chapter 3. Barcode payments in Japan: connecting PayPay at the right price.

Japan's barcode war is over. Code payments reached JPY 16.6 trillion in 2025, up from JPY 200 billion in 2018 (METI, March 31, 2026). PayPay, launched by PayPay Corporation in late 2018, claims 70 million registered users as of July 15, 2025. The question for a merchant is no longer whether to accept code payments, but which of the three available channels to use, since their prices differ by more than a percentage point.

Channel	Rate	Condition	When to choose it
PayPay, basic plan	1,98 %	No additional subscription	Launch, low volume, market testing
PayPay, with the paid PayPayマイストアライトプラン	1,60 %	The plan must cover all of the merchant's locations	Established volume, once the 0.38-point saving pays for the subscription
Alipay+ under the same contract	1,98 %	No plan requirement	Visitors from Asia, with no extra integration
JPQR through PayPay	2,95 %	Unified code covering several providers	A store that wants a single code at the counter and accepts the extra cost

PayPay fee rates by channel, before tax (PayPay merchant help, “決済システム利用料率を知りたい,” paypay.ne.jp, accessed in 2026)

The JPQR standard was defined in 2019 by the Payments Japan Association (キャッシュレス推進協議会), at METI's urging, so merchants would not have to display 10 different codes. Its JPQR Global extension, launched on July 5, 2025, at the Expo 2025 Osaka-Kansai site, links JPQR to foreign standards: first Cambodia's KHQR, then Indonesia's QRIS from August 17, 2025. A visitor from Southeast Asia can now pay with their home wallet. The decision is still an economic one: the unified code costs 2.95% at PayPay, vs. 1.98% direct.

🔑

Barcode payments cost less than cards, and the gap is specific to Japan

The floor of Japanese card costs is interchange: 2.28% in the general category on a Classic card, and up to 2.88% on an Infinite. The merchant fee comes on top of that floor. PayPay direct costs 1.98% before tax, all in. The gap is far from marginal, and it partly explains how quickly Japanese merchants adopted code payments. It is no reason to stop accepting cards, which still account for 82.7% of cashless payments, but it should drive how payment methods are presented at checkout.

Merchant-presented code: the buyer scans the display and enters the amount — no hardware cost, but the cashier has to check the amount
Customer-presented code: the store scans the phone screen — the amount is controlled, but a compatible reader or register is required
Online payment: redirect or app, with an asynchronous status callback to handle like any other webhook
Refunds: processed in the wallet's own tool, with its own time window and rules, which you need to read before the first sale
Reconciliation: the wallet's payout arrives separately from the card acquirer's, on its own schedule

⚠️

A Japanese acceptance matrix goes stale quickly

LINE Pay Japan shut down on April 30, 2025, after its balances were transferred to PayPay in the first quarter, and ゆうちょPay is scheduled to close in December 2026. Before them, Origami Pay disappeared in 2020, and 7pay launched on July 1, 2019, and closed on September 30, 2019, after a large-scale account takeover. A Japanese checkout page that still shows these logos makes the buyer a false promise. Schedule a review of the matrix twice a year, just like a software dependency review.

🎯 Quick question

A Japanese store wants to display a single code at the counter and uses JPQR through PayPay. How much more does it pay than going direct on the basic plan?

Chapter 4. Konbini and deferred payment: reaching buyers who don't pay by card.

Japanese convenience stores are full-service cash collection points. コンビニ収納代行 (konbini payment collection) means paying a bill in store using a barcode or a payment number. The buyer orders online, then pays at the register of a 7-Eleven, FamilyMart, or Lawson. This rail serves two groups that cards don't reach: people who have no card, and people who won't enter one on an unfamiliar site. An online merchant that launches in Japan without this payment method loses both.

The konbini flow, from order to shipment

Buyer

Selects “pay at a convenience store” at checkout

No card data is entered. The order stays pending payment.

Merchant

Asks the provider to issue a payment slip

The provider returns a barcode or a payment number, a deadline, and the store chain where the buyer can pay.

Merchant

Reserves stock and sets an expiration

Stock is tied up with no money collected. The reservation period matches the slip's deadline and never goes beyond it.

Buyer

Pays in cash at the store

At 7-Eleven, only cash and nanaco are accepted for this service (Seven-Eleven Japan, sej.co.jp, accessed in 2026).

Provider

Notifies the merchant of payment

The notification is asynchronous, like a webhook: verify the signature, deduplicate on the identifier, and respond quickly.

Merchant

Ships once payment is received

Konbini is a prepayment rail. Shipping before the notification turns a sale into an unsecured receivable.

⚠️

Konbini is a cash rail, and buyers need to be told

At 7-Eleven, bills can be paid only in cash or with nanaco. The chain explicitly excludes transit e-money, Rakuten Edy, iD, QUICPay, credit and debit cards, barcode payments, QUO Cards, and gift certificates (Seven-Eleven Japan, “各種代金のお支払い” page, sej.co.jp, accessed in 2026). An order page that implies the slip can be paid by card at the counter leads to abandoned payments in store. The label must say cash.

	Konbini payment (収納代行)	Deferred payment (後払い)
When the merchant gets paid	After the buyer pays at the register	After delivery, by the provider that guaranteed the sale
When the goods ship	After the payment notification	Before the buyer pays anything
Who bears the default	No one: if the buyer doesn't pay, the order expires	The provider, which buys the receivable and handles collection
Main players	The three major convenience store chains, through a slip-issuing provider	NP後払い (Net Protections, since 2002) and Paidy (2014, a PayPal subsidiary since 2021)
How the buyer pays	In cash or with nanaco at the register	Often at a convenience store, and therefore in cash, against the invoice received afterward
Effect on conversion	Reduces abandonment caused by card entry	Removes all friction at the time of purchase

Konbini and deferred payment: two mechanisms that are often confused

Three settings determine the outcome. The stock reservation period matches the slip's deadline, with no safety margin. The reminder goes out halfway through, with the payment number spelled out again. Reconciliation handles the edge cases, since a buyer can pay two slips for the same order, or pay after the slip has expired. Build automatic refunds in from the start. Deferred payment changes this logic, because the provider guarantees the sale and takes over collection.

🎯 Quick question

A Japanese order is paid with a konbini payment slip. When should you ship?

Chapter 5. In store: FeliCa in Japan, VANs in Korea.

A terminal imported from Europe or North America works in neither country, for different reasons. In Japan, the dominant contactless technology is FeliCa, developed by Sony, standardized as JIS X 6319-4, and known as NFC-F, while EMV contactless cards use Types A and B. FeliCa transmits at 212 or 424 kbit/s, a speed dictated by subway fare gates. In Korea, the obstacle is contractual: the terminal never talks directly to the issuer and always goes through a VAN (value-added network).

	Japan	South Korea
Radio to support	NFC Types A, B, and F (Type F is essential), plus barcode scanning	EMV contactless Types A and B, now that Samsung Pay has dropped MST from new models
Prepaid e-money	Suica (JR East, 2001), PASMO, nanaco (Seven Card Service, 2007), WAON (AEON Financial Service, 2007), Rakuten Edy (2001)	T-money (Korea Smart Card Co., Ltd., 2004) and Cashbee, operated by 이동의즐거움 under the 이즐 brand
Postpaid contactless	iD (NTT Docomo, 2005) and QUICPay (JCB, 2005), linked to a credit card, on the FeliCa rail	No equivalent: the credit card itself is already postpaid and universally accepted
Mandatory intermediary	Switching through CAFIS (NTT Data, 1984) or CARDNET (1995)	A VAN: Nice Information & Telecom, KIS Information, KICC, Smartro, active since 1990
What blocks a rollout	A reader without FeliCa certification: Suica, iD, and QUICPay won't be read	No VAN contract: the terminal is dead, whatever its level of EMV certification
Most common decline at the register	Insufficient balance on prepaid e-money, fixed by topping up at the register	Transaction exceeds the issuer's limit or the installment line the cardholder requested

What the point of sale must be able to read, market by market

⚠️

The question to ask before ordering terminals for Japan

A standard EMV contactless reader cannot read Suica, iD, or QUICPay, so you need a FeliCa-certified reader, the largest hardware cost of a Japan launch. On the buyer's side, the constraint is gone. Apple built FeliCa into iPhones for the Japanese market starting with the iPhone 7 in 2016, then into its entire global lineup starting with the iPhone 8 and iPhone X. Phones are ready. Terminals are not, and they have to be ordered well in advance.

Japanese prepaid holds a position nothing can replace, even though its volume is declining in METI's 2025 statistics, at JPY 6 trillion, or 3.7% of cashless payments. It remains the only instrument accepted at transit gates, where transaction time is a physical constraint. Suica has 112 million cards issued, including 33 million Mobile Suica accounts (JR East, 2025). A neighborhood store that stops accepting Suica loses commuters. The decision depends on foot traffic, not on payment volume.

Japan, hardware spec: NFC-A, NFC-B, NFC-F, barcode scanning, and EMV certification for the chip
Japan, software matrix: credit card, iD, QUICPay, transit e-money, PayPay, each with its own payout
Korea, contractual prerequisite: the VAN comes before the terminal; without an affiliation, no message reaches the issuer
Korea, legal obligation: an affiliated merchant may not refuse cards, impose a minimum purchase, or pass the merchant fee on to the customer (여신전문금융업법)
Both markets: train cashiers to handle declines, which are more frequent on prepaid than on cards

🎯 Quick question

A retail chain equips its Japanese stores with EMV contactless terminals certified in Europe. What will it be unable to accept?

Chapter 6. Korea online: PGs, simple payment, and regulated merchant fees.

Simple payment (간편지급) has become the main rail for Korean e-commerce. It averaged KRW 1,105.3 billion a day in 2025, up 14.6% year over year, and accounted for 51.9% of card-not-present card payments (Bank of Korea, releases of March 20 and 30, 2026). The breakdown matters as much as the volume: fintechs captured 54.9% of the value, vs. 23.7% for financial institutions and 21.5% for phone manufacturers. A Korean checkout is therefore built around wallets, not around a card form.

🟢

Naver Pay (네이버페이)

Naver Financial Corp., 2015. The wallet of Korea's leading portal and leading marketplace. Its strength comes from e-commerce checkout and its points program. A merchant selling online in Korea should decide on it first.

💬

Kakao Pay (카카오페이)

Kakao Pay Corp., 2014, listed since November 2021. The service is built on KakaoTalk, the messaging app used by nearly every Korean. It covers online payments, in-store QR codes, and transfers, which makes it the natural complement to Naver Pay.

🔵

Toss (토스)

Viva Republica Inc., 2015. It started with free peer-to-peer transfers and grew into a super app with Toss Bank and Toss Payments. It therefore shows up twice in a Korean project: as a wallet to accept and as a candidate PG.

📱

Samsung Pay

Samsung Electronics, 2015. It popularized MST, which emulated the magnetic stripe on terminals without NFC. Dropping that technology from new models pushed the Korean terminal base to EMV contactless, which makes specifying a terminal simpler today.

Merchant’s annual revenue	Credit card	Debit card
Up to KRW 300M	0,40 %	0,15 %
KRW 300M to 500M	1,00 %	0,75 %
KRW 500M to 1B	1,15 %	0,90 %
KRW 1B to 3B	1,45 %	1,15 %
Above KRW 3B	Outside the preferential schedule: rate negotiated within the regulatory framework	Outside the preferential schedule

Korea's preferential merchant fee schedule, effective February 14, 2026 (Financial Services Commission press release, February 12, 2026)

This schedule covers almost the entire market. The FSC applies it to 3.087 million merchants out of 3.225 million, or 95.7%, and likewise to 1.938 million PG sub-merchants out of 2.082 million (FSC, February 12, 2026). This has two consequences for a foreign project. First, the card component of your cost depends on your Korean revenue, and it moves to a new band without any negotiation on your part. Second, what the PG charges on top of that component is set by the contract, and that is the only place where negotiation pays off.

Quantifying the cost of moving up a Korean fee band

Assumptions: KRW 50,000 order, paid by credit card

  Annual Korean revenue KRW 800M  -> band KRW 500M-1B -> 1.15%  ->  KRW 575
  Annual Korean revenue KRW 1.4B  -> band KRW 1B-3B   -> 1.45%  ->  KRW 725
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Difference per order                                          ->  KRW 150

Over 200,000 orders a year, moving up a band costs KRW 30,000,000.
It is neither negotiable nor avoidable: it follows from actual revenue.

Budget separately: the PG margin, charged on top of the card component.
Check in the contract: the rate for debit cards, which is lower in every band.

⚠️

Three Korean bans that rule out practices common elsewhere

The 여신전문금융업법 (Specialized Credit Finance Business Act) prohibits affiliated merchants from refusing card payments. It also bans minimum purchase amounts and passing the merchant fee on to the cardholder. A checkout that says “cards accepted from KRW 10,000” or adds a payment fee to the cart is unlawful in Korea. These three bans apply online and in store alike. Check pricing pages, terms and conditions, and checkout labels before launch, not after a complaint.

🔑

Korean personal data is a contract issue, not a sprint task

In April 2025, the Financial Supervisory Service fined Kakao Pay KRW 15 billion for transferring the data of 40 million users to Alipay Singapore Holdings without consent. The message to the market is clear: cross-border flows of Korean payment data are monitored and penalized. A foreign brand that moves Korean buyers' data to a data warehouse outside Korea must address the issue in its contract with its PG, on the basis of documented consent.

🎯 Quick question

Your Korean revenue grows from KRW 800 million to KRW 1.4 billion. What happens to your credit card fee on a KRW 50,000 order?

Chapter 7. Receiving funds: Zengin, the won, and contract clauses.

Japanese credit transfers run on the Zengin System (全銀システム), operated by Zengin-Net since 1973 and available around the clock since 2018. It handles about 6.5 million transactions a day, worth nearly JPY 12 trillion (Zengin-Net, “Clearing of Funds” page, accessed in 2026). A foreign brand uses it in both directions. It receives its payouts through it, and it sends refunds, local payroll, and supplier payments in the Zengin format, whose constraints cause first submissions to fail.

Four checks to automate before sending a Zengin file

1. ENCODING
   The file is historically in Shift-JIS, not UTF-8.
   Records are 120 BYTES long, not 120 characters.
   -> block the submission if a converted character changes the byte length.

2. BENEFICIARY NAME
   Half-width katakana (半角カナ) only. No kanji, no Latin letters.
   The transcription must match the one on file at the beneficiary's bank.
   -> validate the character set BEFORE building the file, not after a reject.

3. AMOUNTS
   The yen has no minor unit: every amount is an integer.
   An engine that applies two decimal places produces amounts 100 times too small.
   -> explicitly test the "zero-decimal currency" case in the payment chain.

4. BANK DETAILS
   4-digit bank code + 3-digit branch code, which change with every merger.
   -> refresh the bank directory, and use the beneficiary name check
      offered by the 統合ATMスイッチングサービス (NTT Data) since 2005.

🔑

Two Japanese thresholds that switch rails without warning

A credit transfer of 100 million yen or more is not cleared through Zengin. It goes to BOJ-NET, the Bank of Japan's gross settlement system, with different operating hours and a different cost. At the other end, Cotra (ことら送金), launched in 2022, carries person-to-person transfers of up to JPY 100,000 free of charge, addressed by phone number or email. A treasury team in Japan that ignores these two limits finds out on a closing day.

Because it does not trade freely outside Korea, the won imposes a constraint the yen does not, and cross-border payouts take longer to set up. The Bank of Korea has started building an offshore won settlement system (역외 원화결제시스템), scheduled to go live in 2027 (Bank of Korea, 지급결제보고서 for 2025). The same report lists three other projects, including longer operating hours for BOK-Wire+, which took effect on March 30, 2026. The collateralization ratio for net settlement rises from 90% to 100%. ISO 20022 adoption is planned for the second quarter of 2026.

November 30, 2022

Japanese interchange rates become public

The Japan Fair Trade Commission announces that Visa, Mastercard, and UnionPay will publish their standard Japanese rates, following its April 2022 report. Merchants can now audit their statements.

End of March 2025

EMV 3-D Secure deadline for Japanese online merchants

The deadline is set by the クレジットカード・セキュリティガイドライン of the クレジット取引セキュリティ対策協議会. The current version is 6.1.

April 30, 2025

LINE Pay Japan shuts down

Balances were transferred to PayPay in the first quarter of 2025. Remove the logo from checkout pages and acceptance matrices.

July 5, 2025

JPQR Global launches

The standard is rolled out at the Expo 2025 Osaka-Kansai site, linked to Cambodia's KHQR, then to Indonesia's QRIS from August 17, 2025.

February 14, 2026

New Korean merchant fee schedule

Preferential rates of 0.40% to 1.45% for credit and 0.15% to 1.15% for debit, which also apply to PG sub-merchants (FSC press release, February 12, 2026).

March 30, 2026

BOK-Wire+ extends its operating hours

The first of four projects in the Bank of Korea's 2025 payment systems report. ISO 20022 adoption follows in the second quarter of 2026.

December 2026

ゆうちょPay shutdown announced

A wallet linked to a Japan Post Bank account. Plan its removal from acceptance matrices before that date, not after.

April 2027

Scheduled closure of Japan's 電子交換所 (electronic clearinghouse)

Target date for phasing out paper bills and checks in Japan. The same year, Korea aims to launch its offshore won settlement system.

Topic	What to require in Japan	What to require in Korea
Acceptance scope	A named list of supported methods: cards, PayPay, konbini, deferred payment, FeliCa e-money	Type of contract (PG online, VAN in store) and who is eligible to sign it
Cost	Breakdown of interchange, network fees, and margin; a commitment to track the qualified share	A clear split between the regulated card component and the provider's margin
Payout	A schedule by payment method: the wallet and the acquirer don't settle on the same cycle	Payout currency and the mechanism for moving won out of Korea, agreed before launch
Data	No storage of card data, or PCI DSS compliance, under the 割賦販売法	Consent basis and location of buyer data, with liability for any transfer outside Korea
Continuity	Procedure when a national rail goes down, and a documented fallback method	Procedure when the VAN or PG goes down, since each is a single point of failure
Reversibility	Portability of card tokens and export of recurring payment references	Export of sub-merchant affiliations and simple payment references

Clauses to put in the contract, market by market

⚠️

A national rail can go down, so write the continuity clause in advance

From October 10 to 12, 2023, a failure in the Zengin System's relay equipment disrupted credit transfers at several member banks. The incident led to a series of official statements, an industry-wide agreement on compensating customers published on October 18, 2023, and two orders from the FSA requiring Zengin-Net to submit reports. A high-volume payment plan in Japan therefore cannot rely on Zengin credit transfers alone. The same logic applies in Korea, where the VAN and the PG are single points of failure.

🎯 Quick question

You need to pay 150 million yen to a Japanese supplier. Which system will the transfer go through?

Accepting payments in Japan and South Korea. 7 chapters and a final quiz.

Chapter 1. Choosing the collection route.