Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) is pushing a project to shift key administrative and financial documents that have relied on paper mail to mobile. The aim is to boost reliability and efficiency by proving whether documents were sent and received, when recipients viewed them, and their storage history during the mobile transmission process.
According to the industry on the 29th, KISA has selected the "10 key projects to expand mobile e-certification in 2026," focusing on areas closely tied to daily life, and is pushing the project with the goal of launching services or commercialization within the year. The core is to convert contract, agreement, and notice tasks that have been handled via paper mail into digital trust services based on the Electronic Documents Act.
Existing notices such as national tax delinquency notices or traffic violation fines notices have been delivered by paper, resulting in low receipt rates and high sending expense and processing time. To improve this, mobile e-notification was introduced so that bills and notices from public institutions can be received on mobile via KakaoTalk or the Naver app. However, mobile e-notification also focuses on rapid delivery of bills and notices, making it impossible to know whether the document content was altered in the middle or whether the document was stored safely.
Mobile e-certification is a service that complements these limits: when a sender drafts a document and requests sending, the document is delivered and stored through a certified electronic document intermediary. Recipients receive alerts on familiar mobile channels such as KakaoTalk, Naver, or text messages, and view the document after biometric or identity verification. During this process, a history remains of when the document was delivered and when it was viewed. The fact that the document content was not altered can also be proven through the storage records of the certified electronic document center.
This structure is similar to post office content certification. Post office content certification is a paper-based mail service in which the post office officially verifies the content of a document and the fact of sending. However, in the case of post office content certification, to confirm whether the other party actually received it, a separate delivery certification must be requested, and it is not possible to confirm whether the other party opened the document. Also, while post office paper content certification costs about 8,580 won, mobile e-certification is expected to be set at around 1,000 won.
KISA selected the 10 key mobile e-certification projects early this year through the participatory budget program. The selected projects span areas closely linked to daily life, including insurance customer notices, protection of rights in real estate leases, consent for infertility procedures, and responses to disputes in secondhand transactions.
A representative project is the land compensation document conversion project at the Korea Real Estate Board. In the process of building national transportation infrastructure such as expressways or railways, various documents are exchanged, including compensation plan notices and compensation calculation details, but in the past, paper mail often failed to be delivered properly due to address changes or long-term absence, risking disadvantages for compensation recipients.
The Korea Real Estate Board (REB) plans to convert these documents to mobile e-certification to send compensation notices in real time and establish a structure that legally proves whether they were viewed. KISA expects related annual postage and printing expense to fall from 480 million won to around 32 million won.
In addition, IBK Industrial Bank is converting the "notice of loss of benefit of time" sent to long-term arrears customers to mobile e-certification, and Korea Post will build an online-offline integrated system that can send both traditional post office content certification and mobile e-certification together.
Jeon Jin-hyeong, head of KISA's Digital Document Innovation Team, said, "Mobile e-certification is not just a convenient service but one recognized for legal effect and one that people can trust and use," adding, "The 10 selected projects are being pursued with the goal of service launch or commercialization within this year."