How can foreign investors access Korean loan assets?

How does a foreign investor actually reach Korean loan assets?

Not by buying them directly in Korea. Korean loan assets can’t be purchased from abroad the way a foreign investor might buy a listed bond — the asset has to stay in Korea, held by a compliant domestic entity, while capital is connected to it from outside. Access is a question of structure, not of finding the right order ticket.

There is a reason that distinction is so sharp. Korea has a well-developed, standardized channel for foreign investors to buy listed securities — its foreign portfolio investment regime, run through local custodians and brokers, covers all shares listed on the Korea Exchange and KOSDAQ, listed bonds, exchange-traded derivatives, beneficiary certificates, and short-term money-market instruments (Bank of Korea, Foreign Portfolio Investment Procedures, accessed 2026-06-15). Loan receivables are not in scope of that regime. The “order ticket” exists for securities; there is no equivalent off-the-shelf channel for buying domestic loan assets. That is why access has to be structural rather than transactional.

That single design point drives everything below. A foreign professional investor does not reach these assets by sending money into Korea and buying loans; they reach them through an arrangement that holds the assets domestically and links offshore capital to the economics of those assets. This post walks through what has to be true for that link to exist, and what part of it is live today versus planned.

What has to be true for a foreign investor to get exposure?

Three conditions have to be met together. Miss any one and there is no compliant path: the assets have to be held by a compliant entity inside Korea, capital has to be connected through an offshore participation route, and the investor has to be able to verify the assets independently.

Condition	What it requires	Status today
1. Compliant Korean asset holder	A domestic entity that can lawfully hold the loan assets and satisfy Korea’s transfer and custody rules	Live — a Korean special-purpose company (SPC) holds the assets
2. Offshore participation route	An entity outside Korea through which global capital connects to the Korean-held assets	Planned — a Hong Kong vehicle, not yet formed, contingent on regulatory clearance
3. Independent verification	A way for the investor to check the state of the assets without relying solely on periodic reports	In build — an on-chain transparency layer

Source: root64 business structure and product strategy, as of June 2026.

Each condition exists for a different reason. Condition 1 answers a legal requirement — who is allowed to hold the asset in Korea. Condition 2 answers a connectivity requirement — how dollars or stablecoins outside Korea reach won-denominated assets inside it. Condition 3 answers a trust requirement — how an investor abroad confirms the assets are real and performing. The sections that follow take each in turn.

Condition 1: the assets are held by a compliant Korean entity

The first condition is already live. In root64’s structure, a Korean special-purpose company (SPC) holds the loan assets domestically — a separate, bankruptcy-remote entity, not on 8percent’s balance sheet. Two asset types are held this way today (as of June 2026): real-estate-secured consumer loans and securities-account-collateralized loans.

The SPC matters because of who is allowed to hold the asset. The economic right to a loan’s repayments — the right to receive principal and interest (원리금수취권) — can only be transferred to qualified transferees under Korea’s online-lending rules. The Korean SPC is that qualified transferee. A foreign buyer is not. So the asset has to live with the SPC; it cannot live with the investor.

Condition 2: an offshore route connects global capital

The second condition is planned, not live. Even with the assets correctly held in Korea, there has to be an entity outside Korea that global professional investors can actually participate through — because the domestic side runs on Korean-won accounts and Korean rules that non-residents can’t easily plug into.

How hard is “can’t easily plug into”? The friction is concrete even for Korea’s friendliest asset class. To trade listed securities, a foreign investor still routes through Korean intermediaries: foreign investors are recommended to designate a standing proxy — a securities company, bank, or the Korea Securities Depository — to handle account opening, order placement, and settlement on their behalf, alongside accounts held with a local custodian and a broker (Bank of Korea, Foreign Portfolio Investment Procedures, accessed 2026-06-15). Even Korea’s recent liberalization of bond-market access kept this intermediated shape: Clearstream’s 2024 direct link let eligible investors “settle and safekeep KTBs and MSBs directly through their existing Clearstream accounts” rather than opening local accounts (Clearstream, direct link to South Korea, 2024-07-01) — a notable easing, but one that still operates through a structured channel. Even the easiest on-ramp into Korea is intermediated; loan assets have no comparable on-ramp at all.

Holding won itself is its own friction. Non-residents transact Korean won through designated account types, not an ordinary deposit account: from an ordinary non-resident won account, “notification to the BOK is required for overseas remittance of the withdrawn funds,” whereas only the non-resident free won account lets non-residents “convert funds in this account into foreign currency and transfer the proceeds abroad” (Bank of Korea, Internationalization of the Korean Won, accessed 2026-06-15). These are procedural frictions on connecting offshore capital to won-denominated assets — not a prohibition, but a reason the connection has to be engineered rather than improvised.

In root64’s model that offshore route is a Hong Kong vehicle. It is planned and not yet formed, and any token issuance through it is contingent on regulatory clearance. It is not operating today. Connecting global capital to local-currency assets through an offshore pooling vehicle is itself a standard fund-structuring pattern — an offshore feeder that aggregates international capital into the strategy holding the underlying assets (Corporate Finance Institute, master-feeder structure, accessed 2026-06-15) — so the planned offshore route is a conventional design choice, not a novelty. When people describe root64 as a way for global investors to reach Korean loan assets, this is the tier they mean — and it is the part still ahead, not behind.

Condition 3: the investor can verify the assets independently

The third condition is in build. A foreign investor connecting capital across borders into an unfamiliar asset class needs to confirm the assets are real and performing without taking a single party’s word for it. Conventional reporting is periodic, which leaves gaps between reports.

root64 addresses this with a transparency layer: cash transactions and investment balances are recorded on a public blockchain, and external verifications — through independent channels such as property-registry checks — are logged on-chain as well. The aim is that an investor can check the state of the assets directly rather than waiting for a monthly report. This layer is being built first, ahead of tokenization.

What can a foreign professional investor actually do today, and what is still planned?

Today, the live elements are the Korean side: a Korean SPC holding two asset types, with capital connected through a pilot arrangement. The tokenized offshore route that would open the structure to global professional investors broadly is planned, not yet available.

It is worth being precise here, because the two are easy to conflate. What exists is the asset-holding foundation in Korea and a pilot that proves the connection end to end. What does not yet exist is a live, generally available onboarding product for foreign investors running through the offshore vehicle. There is no live retail product, and there is no open subscription today.

Element	Live today	Planned
Korean SPC holding the assets	Yes	—
Live asset types (real-estate-secured consumer loans; securities-account-collateralized loans)	Yes	—
On-chain transparency layer	In build	Expanding
Offshore vehicle (Hong Kong) for tokenized participation	No — not yet formed	Yes, contingent on regulatory clearance
Generally available foreign-investor onboarding	No	Follows the offshore tier

Source: root64 business structure and product strategy roadmap, as of June 2026.

The honest summary: the asset-holding tier is real and operating; the offshore tokenization tier that broadens access is on the roadmap and contingent on clearances. root64 serves professional investors only, through private placement — not a public offering.

How is this different from just sending money to Korea?

Sending money to Korea and buying loans directly is not an available path — that is the whole point. There is no defined channel for a non-resident to buy these loan assets off the shelf, and the right to a loan’s repayments can’t be transferred to an arbitrary foreign buyer in the first place.

This is not because Korea is closed. The opposite is true for securities: in December 2023 Korea abolished its three-decade-old foreign-investor pre-registration requirement (the Investment Registration Certificate, or IRC) and replaced it with global-standard identifiers, allowing foreign investors to “make investments in domestically listed securities” using an LEI or passport number instead of pre-registering (Financial Services Commission press release, 2024-06-21; IRC abolition effective 2023-12-14). That reform applies specifically to domestically listed securities — it actively liberalized access to Korea’s capital markets while leaving loan receivables outside the scope of any such channel. So the absence of a loan-purchase route is a question of scope, not a statutory ban: the open door is for listed securities, and loan assets simply sit outside it.

Two specific things block the direct route. First, the channel itself: there is no defined channel for a non-resident to buy these loan assets directly, and the domestic lending market runs on Korean-won accounts at a domestic institution that non-residents can’t easily use — non-residents hold won only through designated account types, with outbound remittance from an ordinary non-resident won account requiring notification to the Bank of Korea (Bank of Korea, accessed 2026-06-15). Second, the transfer restriction: the right to receive a loan’s principal and interest can only move to qualified transferees, and a foreign investor is not one. A structured connection is different in kind. The asset stays with a Korean entity that is a qualified transferee; the foreign investor’s capital is connected to the economics of those assets through an offshore route, rather than the investor trying to buy the asset itself. It is the difference between owning the loan in Korea (not possible for a non-resident) and gaining exposure to it through a compliant structure (the path being built).

How does root64 design that access path?

By combining the three conditions into one structure: a Korean SPC holds the assets today, a planned offshore vehicle is designed to connect global capital, and a transparency layer lets investors verify the assets independently. The order is deliberate — the asset-holding foundation and transparency come first, and the offshore tokenization tier is built on top.

This is also why root64 describes itself as transparency-first rather than token-first. Many tokenization efforts begin by issuing a token; root64 begins by getting the assets correctly held in Korea and making them independently verifiable, then adds the offshore participation route. For a foreign professional investor, the practical takeaway is that access to Korean loan assets is a structural achievement, not a transaction — and the live pieces of that structure are the ones holding and verifying the assets, with the offshore route still planned.