A pricing glitch on the mobile app of Toss Bank briefly allowed customers to purchase Japanese yen at roughly half the prevailing market rate, prompting a burst of opportunistic currency buying before the issue was corrected.
The error occurred on March 10, when the app displayed a foreign-exchange rate of about 472 Korean won per ¥100, according to the bank and posts circulating on online communities.
At the time, the market rate for the Japanese currency was about 934 won per ¥100, meaning the app temporarily offered the yen at nearly a 50% discount to the actual exchange rate.
The incorrect price appeared at around 7:29 p.m. local time and lasted for about seven minutes. During that window, some users with automatic buy orders in place were able to purchase yen at the sharply reduced rate.
After identifying the problem, Toss Bank suspended yen exchange transactions on the app. The service was later restored, with the bank saying normal trading resumed at around 9 p.m. local time.
A bank official said the issue stemmed from a temporary misapplication of exchange-rate data during an internal system check. The lender is currently reviewing the volume of transactions executed during the brief window.
Toss Bank said it will determine appropriate measures after completing a review of the incident, including the cause of the glitch and the scale of the affected trades.
The episode echoes a similar foreign-exchange pricing error at Hana Bank on Feb. 12, 2025, when the Vietnamese dong was mistakenly quoted at about one-tenth of its normal value.
That error lasted roughly three minutes and resulted in several transactions at the incorrect rate. Under South Korea’s electronic financial transaction regulations, the affected trades were later canceled.
