In Korea, foreign tourists can’t even hail a taxi by app. CES-winning CrossHub wants your passport to be your wallet

How much of a country’s convenience can a visitor actually use? I’ve been wondering about that ever since I spent ten days traveling around South Korea in September.

Japan and Korea send each other a lot of travelers. In 2025, Japan welcomed a record 42.68 million foreign visitors, and about 9.46 million of them came from Korea — more than one in five.

But more visitors doesn’t mean a smoother trip. Today, most of a city’s convenience lives inside smartphone apps: hailing a taxi, ordering dinner, buying a train ticket, paying for all of it. And most of those apps start with an identity check that assumes you live there.

Travelers get stuck at that front door. One Korean startup wants to open it with a passport.

In early October, Duncan from Hoppers, the team behind the Korea Nomad Gateway program, got in touch: two Korean startups were visiting Japan, and we might be able to catch them that evening. One of them was CrossHub.

A little after 10:30 p.m., Ra Sangyong, who heads strategic initiatives at CrossHub, sat down with us.

The short answer to my question: the real problem for travelers isn’t how they pay. It comes one step earlier — they can’t prove who they are in the way the country expects.

WHO IS

Ra SangyongRa Sangyong

Head of Strategic Initiatives, CrossHub

“Foreigners have no credit history and no bank account here. That’s why they can’t use local services.”── Ra Sangyong, in this interview

1. NOWHead of Strategic Initiatives, CrossHubLeads new business strategy. Working to extend passport-based identity checks from travel to universities and healthcare

Ra leads strategic initiatives at CrossHub. In a Korean interview in September 2026, the company described its goal as connecting markets around the world with a single identity technology. On the night we met, he walked us through the whole journey on his laptop, from downloading the app to picking up a card at the airport.

We’re a financial technology company. Using AI and blockchain, we build services that connect digital identity with payments. Our technology won the top prize in the FinTech category at CES.

What we most want in Japan is open innovation — working with government agencies in tourism, or with private companies, to run pilots and real-world tests together.

The foundation is IDBLOCK, our identity system. We call it fourth-generation identity verification.

The key point is that we don’t keep personal data on our servers. You hold your own data. What we hold is only the result — “this was verified” — and we record that value on a blockchain. Technically, it falls under zero-knowledge proofs.

The technology itself doesn’t make money. Think of it as the front door to everything that comes after it.

What locals take for granted is different for foreigners. A tourist on a short trip has no credit history and no bank account here, so local services are hard to use. That’s the pain point.

Come to Korea and you’ll see: foreigners can’t hail a taxi with an app. Kakao Pay and Naver Pay don’t accept cards issued abroad. Food delivery apps are tied to resident identity, so you can’t even log in.

That’s right. And the KTX high-speed train is hard to book online too. You can buy a ticket with cash at the counter, but not instantly on the web.

Let’s take someone visiting Kyoto. Before the trip, the same way you pack a suitcase at home, you get ready in the Travel Pass app.

First, you verify your identity with your passport and a photo of your face. Then you decide how much you’ll spend and top up before you leave — say, 300,000 yen for the trip. Top-ups already connect to overseas payment services like Alipay and Stripe.

When you land, you pick up your card at the currency exchange counter. In Korea, that’s Woori Bank, one of the country’s biggest banks. It invested in us and is running this project with us.

The important part is that the pickup happens in person. In finance, the most important step is KYC — know your customer. To use banking services anywhere in the world, you need to be verified face to face at least once. We do that at the airport counter and issue a card in your name. It’s a prepaid card, and you can top it up with cash too.

From there, you can hail a taxi to your hotel and order delivery to your room. You use local services just like a resident.

No. We never take the money. Investors ask that a lot.

The bank holds all the funds. We only provide the platform the money moves through; only records travel through us. We earn a fee, nothing more. That’s why it’s safe — and why, for us, scaling up is our destiny.

Combining local currencies with our identity layer.

In Korea, we’re in talks with one of the large metropolitan cities about this. When a foreigner signs up to visit the city, they receive a card preloaded with, say, 30,000 or 40,000 won. That money only works in that city. But nobody comes to town and spends just the 30,000 won. That’s the idea.

In Kyoto, if card issuers and local partners formed a joint team, we could run a large pilot. We suggested trying it once as open innovation.

Korail, Korea’s national railway, has asked us to make a KTX-branded Travel Pass — a card with a little money preloaded, for foreigners who love traveling around Korea by KTX.

Woori Bank gave us another idea. Many travelers who visit Korea also go to Japan. So if someone who came to Korea then visits a Japanese city, they could earn points — a city-to-city, country-to-country exchange. They want to do that with us.

Student IDs. Kyoto is a university city. But when students graduate, many of them leave.

If this card becomes a student ID, it works as a verified ID for everyone, international students included. Then at graduation, you could load money that only works in Kyoto, or give rewards for completing missions. The card gives graduates a reason to stay. We’re having the same conversation with universities in Korea where international students make up more than 10% of the student body.

The system is already built. We planned to launch with the bank this month, but instead next month we’ll start a closed beta with 15,000 people. The full launch is planned for the first half of next year.

Next year, Korea hosts World Youth Day, a major Catholic event. At least 800,000 people are expected, and the event’s sponsor bank is Woori Bank. That’s what makes this possible, and we’re timing our preparations around it.

V Pay is technology we built for an era when people pay by voice. Right now, rather than pushing voice payments, we’re proposing it as a countermeasure to voice phishing scams, which are a real problem in Korea.

The hardest part of voice payment is telling whether a voice is a recording or someone speaking live. We’re working on that too. Internally, we’re also thinking about prototypes for voice payments through smart glasses.

We develop in-house, but we don’t try to research everything ourselves. Korea has a lot of foundational technology already developed at universities and research institutes like KAIST. When we find what we need, we license it or buy it, and that’s where our investment goes. We also file patents. It’s faster that way.

Our model runs on fees, so we have to grow. And Japan is a very attractive place to do that.

This is my personal view, and it may not match our CEO’s. I think Japan is roughly twice Korea’s market. And in some areas, like apps, Korea has moved a little faster, so our experience could be useful there.

We also talked to a Canadian bank about expanding into North America. But the rules, even the accounting standards, are very different there. Japan’s systems are very similar to ours, and the cultures are close, so adapting a Korean app for Japan shouldn’t meet much resistance. So Japan is twice Korea’s size as a market, and on top of that, we can bring over what we’ve already built and learned in Korea. For us, its potential is even bigger than that number suggests.

Put Ra’s story together and you get a trip that looks like this: verify with your passport before you leave, pick up a card at the airport, use taxis and delivery like a resident, get welcomed with money that only works in that city — and, if you’re a student, get a reason to stay.

Here’s where it could lead:

• Travelers use the same apps as locals from day one
  Identity is handled before the trip; at the airport you collect a single card. No local address or language needed to get through the door.
• Local currencies become a way to attract visitors
  Currencies built for residents open up to people from outside. “Money that only works here” becomes a reason to choose the next destination.
• Visitors turn into residents
  International students and long-term stayers use student IDs and everyday services on the same identity layer. The line between traveler and resident starts to blur.

How to read this, depending on who you are

• If you work in local government or tourism: Look beyond how many visitors arrive to what they could actually use once they did. That’s where spending gets lost. It’s worth asking whether your local currency or transit card could open up to outsiders
• If you work in finance or payments: CrossHub never holds funds; it partners with banks and provides the rails. Designing the connections — banks, railways, cities — on top of identity looks like where the competition will be
• If you’re an engineer or researcher: Zero-knowledge identity checks and voice authentication that can tell live speech from recordings are about to be tested for real in travel and payments
• If you love to travel: Next time you go abroad, notice where you get stopped at a “residents only” door. It tells you a lot about that country’s digital society — and visitors to your own country are standing at the same doors

When people talk about inconvenience for foreign tourists, they usually mean shops that don’t take credit cards. What Ra described sits one step earlier. Taxis, delivery and train tickets all ask, at the app’s front door, whether you’re a resident. Add as many payment methods as you like — if you can’t get through that door, you can’t use any of them. That’s why CrossHub starts with passport-based identity: that’s the real bottleneck.

Local currencies have mostly been discussed as tools for residents. Handing them to visitors turns them into a reason to choose a destination. Give someone 30,000 won and they rarely spend only 30,000 won. It’s a simple idea, but verified identity is what lets a city decide who receives it. Watching a technology conversation turn into a city-policy conversation was the most interesting part of the night.

A system built for visitors to Korea is about to be tested in Japan. One in five visitors to Japan comes from Korea, and plenty of Japanese travel the other way. When Ra says Japan’s systems are similar, the flip side is that Japan may be showing travelers the same walls. Technology from abroad can be a mirror for frictions we no longer notice at home. It’s a story we’ll keep following.