Toss Place Co., a subsidiary of South Korean mobile financial service platform Toss, is gaining attention with its payment device that offers a face recognition feature mainly for small business owners.

Toss Front, a payment terminal developed by Toss Place, offers the Face Pay system that allows automatic payments simply by scanning the face.

Installations of Toss Front have surged in recent months – from 4,000 to 5,000 units per month in early 2025 to about 12,000 per month now.

There are 135,000 Toss Front devices installed nationwide as of May.

“Toss Place is fundamentally a company that serves small business owners,” said Choi Jae-ho, chief executive officer of Toss Place, in a recent interview with Maeil Business Newspaper. “Our business is not just about enabling payments and collecting fees.”

“Our short-term goal is to boost our presence in the payments market,” he said. “And our secret weapon is Face Pay.”

Toss Place aims to pioneer a new market with face-based payments, just as Samsung Pay gained dominance in offline retail by enabling payments through smartphones.

Three companies in Korea, including Toss Place, currently offer similar services.

Choi, who studied engineering in college, worked at IBM Corp., Hyundai Card Co., and LINE Financial Corp. before joining Toss in 2020.

He led the creation of Toss Front, drawing on his experience in both technology and planning.

“We thought deeply about what features were truly necessary for small business owners,” he said. “We focused on three key criteria: fast and error-free transactions, simple operation, and the ability to integrate with other services moving forward.”

He also prioritized scalability, recognizing the rapid pace of technological advancement.

Although Toss Place is still a young company catering to small businesses, Choi has big ambitions.

“Toss Front will serve as the foundation for offering customized, comprehensive financial services using payment data,” he said. “Our goal is to help small business owners reduce costs and run their shops more efficiently.”

The next step for the company is to connect Toss Front with Toss POS, a store management solution.

This would allow small business owners to use the Toss app to view sales data and manage store operations, customer relationships, and reservations - all in one place.

In the long term, Toss Place plans to integrate more services through the main Toss platform, which boasts 25 million monthly active users.

These include offering promotions and coupons to attract customers, providing loans for small business owners with mid-to-low credit through Toss Bank, and offering business bank accounts and credit cards.

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