Airwallex and ONE Store, South Korea’s leading independent app marketplace, have signed a memorandum of understanding to explore a strategic partnership aimed at reducing the financial complexity facing Korean game developers and publishers as they expand into international markets. The agreement was signed on 15 October in Seoul, with senior representatives from both companies present.
The partnership is framed around combining ONE Store’s domestic gaming distribution network with Airwallex’s cross-border payments infrastructure. Korean developers operating globally routinely encounter fragmented payment landscapes: differing platform fee structures, local payment method requirements and multiple acquiring relationships that add cost and operational overhead before a single player transaction is processed. The two companies say they intend to explore ways to address that friction, though specific products or integration terms have not yet been announced.
The strategic logic
ONE Store occupies a distinctive position in the Korean app economy. As an independent marketplace it sits outside the Google Play and Apple App Store duopoly, and its expansion vehicle, ONE Store Global, signals an ambition to export that model. For Airwallex, the partnership extends its footprint in the gaming vertical, a sector where cross-border payment volumes are high, margin sensitivity is acute and the need to support multiple currencies and local payment methods is structural rather than incidental.
Keun Bin Kim, head of Enterprise for South Korea at Airwallex, noted that Korean developers are building businesses for players around the world and said the partnership is intended to simplify global payment experiences as they reach new audiences. Henry Chang, chief executive of ONE Store, said that as Korean developers increasingly target global markets, working with Airwallex offers an opportunity to reduce the complexity of international payments and operations.
Market context and regulatory backdrop
Airwallex holds more than 85 regulatory licences across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, which is a meaningful operational asset in a sector where payment acceptance in each new market typically requires a regulated local entity or a licensed partner. For game developers, that breadth matters: a title launching simultaneously in Japan, Germany and Brazil needs locally compliant payment acceptance in each territory, and managing that through a single provider reduces the compliance and treasury overhead considerably.
The broader context is worth noting. South Korea is one of the world’s largest games markets by revenue, and its developers, including globally recognised studios and a deep tier of mid-sized publishers, have accelerated international distribution following the domestic success of titles that have found audiences well beyond the peninsula. Payment infrastructure has historically been a bottleneck: Korean won settlement, hedging costs and the reconciliation burden of multi-currency revenue streams are recurring operational complaints in the sector.
Competition in the cross-border payments space for gaming is active. Several specialist platforms and embedded-finance providers target game developers specifically, and the major global payment processors have built vertical products aimed at this segment. Airwallex’s position is that its regulated infrastructure and multi-currency account architecture offer a more unified operating layer than assembling point solutions per market.
Airwallex has also confirmed it will participate in G-STAR, the Korean games industry trade event scheduled for November, where it plans to engage directly with developers and publishers on the practicalities of global expansion. That appearance will be the first tangible public test of how commercially developed the partnership is beyond the MOU stage.
The MOU represents an intent to explore rather than a concluded commercial agreement, and the announcement contains no committed product roadmap, revenue targets or implementation timeline. Readers should treat the current announcement as a statement of direction.
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