About Sg Lee
SG Lee, CEO and founder of Toss, has commented on the potential economic impact of U.S. trade policy changes. In April 2025, he stated that the U.S. wants to replace Most Favored Nation status with reciprocal tariffs, which he said would harm small countries because they lack bargaining power. He noted that Singapore's Ministry of Trade and Industry had revised its 2025 growth forecast down to 0–2%, and he predicted slower growth and a possible recession in the medium term.
Lee has also discussed Toss's business strategy and IPO plans. In December 2022, he said the company was financially ready for an IPO but had not decided on a market or timing, describing the IPO as "Day One" rather than an endpoint. He noted that Toss had half of South Korea's population as registered users and a 20% market share of online payments, and that its buy now, pay later product would be distributed to that base. He also said Toss had acquired a stake in mobility operator VCNC (Tada), citing the high frequency of transactions in Seoul as a key factor.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Sg Lee's recent appearances.
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Transcript (7 segments)
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Sg Lee0:00
Even though we launch BNPL at the end of this month, it's not going to start from rock bottom. We already have half of our Korean population as our registered users, and we already have 20% market share of entire online payments. Our BNPL product will be on top of that, so it will be distributed and exposed to half of the population right from the start. And we have such great data from the users. With the user's consent, we have such a variety and depth of data, which gives us a pretty good differentiating vector for our credit scoring. We think we're going to have better credit scoring for the BNPL product.
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Interviewer0:48
Will it be about turning more profit here, or is it locking in your users or building up on your database?
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Sg Lee0:57
Well, if you see in the foreign BNPL cases, it was a really great boost for the merchants' sales and AOV numbers. So once we launch our BNPL product, we're expecting we can get extra take rates from the merchants as we give them an extra boost for their sales and GMV. So yes, it's more about profit, but also at the same time we're expecting our merchants' business success along the way.
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Interviewer1:31
Is it the same rationale that's being applied here when it comes to your recent move to enter the mobility business, because you recently acquired a stake in VCNC, TADA operator?
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Sg Lee1:46
Well, in terms of mobility, we're not really that fascinated about the entire market size, but what we really love about it is actually the level of frequency. Just in Seoul, 400 million transactions happen annually every year. That's tremendous frequency, which is actually equivalent to e-commerce traffic in Korea. By the way, in Korea, the e-commerce GMV is number three to four in global, which is massive. So once you can make the closed loop with our half a... that with this more use cases for our payments, we thought we can make more presence in our Toss payments in the payment sector.
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Interviewer2:45
Any update to give us about your IPO plans? When and where?
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Sg Lee2:52
I'm afraid I cannot specify at this moment. We are financially ready for IPO about any time, but right now we haven't decided about which market and when to go IPO. But what I can tell you is our investors are very long-term prospective investors. They never really thought that IPO is the end of the journey for Toss; it's basically the start of it. So the research that we are doing for IPO, the project name itself is 'Day One'. So we're thinking about going beyond the Korean market and global. We are getting into the more daily life of the financial users. There's a lot of room to grow and there's a lot of journey remains. So IPO timing wise, we cannot specify yet.
