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 did not respond to questions from Biometric Update about whether its liveness detection has been tested for compliance with the ISO/IEC 30107-3 presentation attack detection (PAD) standard in time for publication.

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