In March 2015, I co-founded PeopleFund with the conviction that technology could fix something broken in Korean lending. The banks served the creditworthy. The rest of the market — tens of millions of people who needed credit and could repay it but did not fit the criteria that legacy credit systems had built over decades — was served by lenders charging rates that made the math of getting out of debt nearly impossible.
What I did not fully appreciate in March 2015 was that building a better financial product was the easier part. The harder part was convincing a regulatory system that had been built to prevent the specific things we were trying to do.
The regulatory problem
The Korean Financial Services Commission did not have a framework for P2P lending in 2015. What they had was a framework for things that looked like banking — deposit-taking, loan origination, credit intermediation — and a settled conviction that these activities required bank licenses that P2P platforms could not obtain.
The implicit logic was protective: the history of unregulated lending in Korea included enough fraud, predatory practice, and systemic risk that regulators had good reasons for wanting strict controls. The problem was that strict controls, applied uniformly, made genuine innovation impossible.
We spent eighteen months arguing a more precise version of this problem: that P2P lending, done properly, was less risky than the informal credit markets it displaced, and that the regulatory framework should be designed to enable responsible platforms rather than prevent all platforms.
What arguing with regulators actually looks like
The public narrative of regulatory conflict usually involves dramatic moments — the hearing, the ruling, the pivot. The actual experience is almost entirely unglamorous.
It is meetings with junior officials who have no authority to decide anything but whose understanding of your model determines whether it ever reaches someone who does. It is written submissions that are read by people who will not respond to them directly but whose questions, three months later, reveal that they read them carefully. It is relationships built at industry conferences with people whose titles suggest they are irrelevant but who turn out to be exactly the people you needed to know.
We had partners in this. JB Financial Group, one of Korea's regional banking groups with roughly 50 trillion won in assets, agreed to partner with us in August 2015 — before the regulation existed, before there was a legal framework for what we were trying to do. That partnership was itself an argument to regulators: that established financial institutions believed the model was sound.
What we won
In 2019, the Online Investment-Linked Finance Business Act — the P2P Finance Act — passed into law. It was the legal framework we had spent years arguing for.
By 2021, PeopleFund held fifty-seven percent of Korea's personal credit P2P lending market. We had raised 759 billion won in our Series C from Bain Capital and Goldman Sachs. We had processed over one trillion won in loans.
The eighteen months of regulatory work were not separate from the business. They were the business. You cannot build a lending platform in a market that has no legal framework for what you are doing. We had to build the framework alongside the product.
What it taught me
Every significant market I have entered since has had some version of a regulatory barrier — not always formal, but always real. The GLP-1 pharmaceutical market in Korea in 2025 had distribution regulations that favored incumbents. The wellness supplement market has labeling and claims regulations that shape what you can and cannot say about what you sell.
The instinct of most entrepreneurs is to treat regulation as an obstacle to route around. I think that is usually wrong. Regulators, at their best, are trying to solve the same problem you are: they want markets that work, they want consumers protected, they want innovation that is durable rather than extractive.
The conversation that moves things is the one that starts there — not with "let me do what I want," but with "here is what we are both actually trying to accomplish."
It takes longer. It holds.