[FinTech Special]
Despite high potential growth of FinTech, or financial technology, in South Korea, many startups are still facing difficulties to jump into the market due to the high entry barrier of the financial industry, according to an attorney in an interview with Korea IT Times.
"Korea has strong potentials in the FinTech industry with the advanced financial IT infrastructures but firms are still finding it difficulties to enter the market due to the high entry barrier, the rigid regulatory environment and concerns for securities issue" said Koo Tae-eon, founder of Tek & Law and former public prosecutor for the High-Tech Crime Investigation Department of Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office.
"Enterprises in these sectors are mostly start-ups driven by the spirit of challenge and passion," he said, adding, "In order to back these new companies, we have provided free legal advice for many of them."
Tek & Law has provided free legal advice in nearly 70 cases as a designated consultative law firm for Startup Alliance, a joint private and public sector network created to help start-up companies.
A number of these start-ups that were helped by Tek & Law, such as 8 percent, Hankook NFC, OpenTrade, and Callbus Lab, are now attracting attention in the industry.
"These new companies began with great energy and ambition, but faced obstacles in the form of various regulations. We provided legal advice and helped them overcome those obstacles," said Koo, who had also served as an attorney for Kim & Chang, the biggest law firm in South Korea.
As a pioneering law firm in the FinTech field, Tek & Law has also provided specialized legal services in ICT sectors including FinTech, IoT, O2O (Online to Offline business), big data, healthcare and new energy.
As global IT companies are changing the landscape of the world, searching for new financial business models based on new IT technologies, it is causing great and often unnoticed changes with regard to financial products and concepts through FinTech which is a new type of financial technology based on IT technologies.
In reality, however, these companies face difficulties embracing these new opportunities due to huge obstacles such as the strict regulation on financial businesses and personal information protection, according to the attorney.
"We have fully understood these problems and have conducted research to find the solutions based on the expertise of its team specializing in IT technologies,” the law firm’s chief said.
Tek & Law has so far achieved tangible results in cases regarding protection of intellectual property right, i.e. business secrets, patent, and copyright, of both global and domestic companies and in helping domestic e-commerce companies make inroads into global markets.
“In 2013, a Chinese game that copied a famous South Korean mobile game, I Love Coffee, became a huge hit and the Korean company who had put a lot of effort and money into developing the original game suffered significant losses,” he said.
“We were the first in South Korea who made a joint effort with a law firm in China to call upon the Chinese regulatory authorities to take measures to shut down the server of the imitation game.”
As a result, the unlawful Chinese company was driven out of the Chinese mobile game market and interests of the Korean company were safeguarded.
Tek & Law has also taken defence in all of the nine major legal cases in South Korea relating to the leakage of personal information. Among these is the case in which three credit card companies were accused of leaking more than 100 million pieces of personal information, generating a huge shock to the public back in early 2014. Based on such experience, the firm has actively engaged in cases of corporate hacking and infringement of client data.
“We have also provided practical advice on information communications and data protection, responded to requests from investigating agencies and competent authorities, and taken defence in subsequent civil and criminal cases based on our expertise and extensive experience,” he said.
Asked about the firm’s future plan, Koo confidently said, “We will work closely with leading IT companies and continually look for areas where the law can be improved so that it is more in step with fast-moving development of technology,” adding, “In this way, we will be at the forefront in helping those companies to grow in the global marketplace.”
