A Strategy for Survival and Victory
For Toss, culture is both a "survival strategy" and a "victory strategy." Toss's corporate culture completely fuses culture and work, and operates from the perspective that it must be able to provide practical help so that work can be done well. Because it thought, decided, and worked based on organizational culture even when the organization was struggling and even when it was shaken, the organizational culture has not been neglected even in the process of growing into a large-scale organization as it is now, and continuous experience management is being carried out.
At Toss, arrival time is as you please, and there is no limit on the number of vacation days. There are no ranks or titles either. Even the CEO is called "Seung-gun-nim," aiming for a horizontal culture. A team's leader is not a "manager" who gives orders, but plays the role of a "facilitator" who helps team members effectively achieve goals. Although it is an organization without managers, each team member communicates with colleagues and finds "my work" on their own. It gives complete freedom but assigns complete responsibility, so that everyone becomes both a practitioner and a "Directly Responsible Individual (DRI)."
The transparent disclosure of a company's operations, policies, and risks is one condition of good governance. And Toss shares practically all information company-wide. At every affiliate, a "Weekly Alliant Meeting" and "Weekly QnA" are held on a weekly basis, and everything from the corporate-card expenses each person used to each team's work status is shared through the weekly mail. You might wonder, "What if personal information leaks?" or "Is it okay to disclose even this kind of information?" But through such actions, Toss sought to build a high level of information-sharing infrastructure and mutual trust. The idea is to make the information needed for decision-making already exist in one's head, so that a suitable solution can be found easily.
*DRI: a concept borrowed from Apple — a directly responsible individual. That is, a concept designed so that the most expert person on a particular task becomes the person responsible for the decision.
Weekly QnA: a team-leader Q&A session where you can ask the team leader anything you are curious about regarding the Toss team.
[Lee Seung-gun, CEO of Toss © Viva Republica]
The Obsession with Transparency Hidden in Customer Service Too
Toss is a company that provides financial services. Therefore, a user cannot but worry about personal-information protection — how their personal information is being used, whether destruction is properly carried out when they leave the service, and so on. Toss regards obsession with customer value as a core value, and considers customers' information protection and security the top priority. So Toss newly established a personal-information-protection website where personal-information-protection activities can be checked at a glance. Anyone can easily access this website through the Toss app and website. Centered on Toss's five core principles for personal-information protection, it separated the personal-information-handling policy into a distinct menu to resolve customers' questions about where their personal information is used, and it also organizes and introduces the activities of the "Toss Data Protection Compliance Advisory Committee." From January 2023, it launched the "Personal Information Reassurance Report" service, so that customers can check at any time the record of personal information looked up during service use. In 2023, Toss also carried out a project, centered on the Toss white-hacker team, to hack Toss within 48 hours. And it disclosed the entire process of this project through YouTube. To state the conclusion, the Toss white-hacker team failed to hack Toss within 48 hours. Red Teaming is carried out in various situations — at leading IT companies and in many countries' military-training situations — to inspect and supplement an organization's strategy, but disclosing this entire process to everyone is exceptional. It may have been a for-show internal project. Even so, such activity by Toss further highlighted the point that, for good governance, transparent disclosure of a company's operations, policies, and risks is necessary.
*Toss Data Protection Compliance Advisory Committee: an independent body within Toss launched in November 2022, playing the role of monitoring and controlling whether Toss is properly complying with data-related laws.
Red Teaming: the act of finding problems or vulnerabilities from a different perspective and intentionally attacking them, in order to inspect and supplement an organization's strategy. It originated from the virtual "Red Team" that the US organized to identify and analyze the vulnerabilities of the friendly Blue Team during mock military-training exercises.
In an environment like the fintech industry, where the uncertainty of technology and the market itself can act as a crisis, the value that transparency holds is even greater. Having declared "bold information transparency and accessibility," Toss now looks beyond a unicorn toward a decacorn.
by Editor L