Apple Pay could reach South Korea within days via Hyundai Card

(Image credit: Apple)

Apple Pay is almost ready to launch in South Korea with regulatory approval possibly arriving within days.

A new report says that Hyundai Card is ready to support Apple Pay in the country, with the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) in the middle of reviewing the Apple Pay service launch clause submitted by the company.

Coming soon

The approval process could complete as soon as the end of this month, TechCrunch reports. However, it could also take another month or so depending on how quickly the review takes place.

Hyundai Card is a financial unit of Hyundai Motors and will reportedly have a one-year partnership with Apple that will make Apple Pay exclusive to the company for the first year. After that, others will be able to come online. No official statement has been made by either Apple or Hyundai Card, however.

Apple Pay support will allow Hyundai Card owners to make contactless payments using their iPhone and Apple Watch, while online orders will also be possible on iPads and Macs as well. Any iPhone will support Apple Pay so long as it has either Face ID or Touch ID support — with the iPhone 5s being the one exception to that rule. All Apple Watches from the Series 1 and later support Apple Pay.

TechCrunch reports that South Korea is "one of the fastest-growing countries in the world for cashless services," but that it currently doesn't have Apple Pay support. There is also no support for the competition, with Google yet to bring its own Android Pay service to the country. That gives Apple Pay a clear run, at least for now. While Hyundai Card will have that one-year exclusivity deal, we can be sure that Apple will want to expand to other cards and banks in due course.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.