Starting with securities this year, Naver’s subsidiary corporation Line, a Korean messaging app popular in Japan, plans for new FinTech such as crypto currency, insurance, and online banking.
Naver invested $664M USD in Line this year while pulling in another $531.2M USD from foreign investors for a total of about $1.2B USD this year. Experts say that the Japanese government’s efforts to ease regulations were behind the decision to make such a bold investment in a short period of time.
It didn’t take long to expand the business when the corporation was launched. Line announced that it will establish ‘Line Securities’ with Nomura Holdings in March. The securities company will officially launch next year after obtaining approval from the Japanese financial authorities. In July, Line established ‘BitBox’, a crypto currency exchange, in Singapore. Line released its own crypto currency called ‘Link’ in October. To progress its fintech, it also started selling insurance and investment products through Line Insurance and Line Smart Investment.
Local assessment of the new financial services is not bad either. Line Smart Investment is a service that was released along with Goldman Sachs and Japanese online broker Polio, which invested 7 billion yen (about $69.3M USD).
