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Bank signatory, cash administration, reconciliation and vendor control — the segregation of duties a three-person Korean office cannot build on its own, provided from outside it.
A foreign company’s Korean operation usually starts with two or three people. One of them ends up handling money.
That person raises the invoice, approves it, prepares the payment, and executes it. They also reconcile the bank account, and they are the only person in the organisation who reads Korean bank statements. Head office receives a monthly report that this same person prepares.
Every internal control framework ever written says this is unacceptable. Every small foreign subsidiary does it anyway, because there is no second person to give the work to.
We act as an authorised signatory on your Korean account. The local team prepares the payment run and provides the supporting evidence; we release it against that evidence.
In practice:
Two models, and we will tell you which fits.
| Funds in your accounts | Funds administered by us | |
|---|---|---|
| Account ownership | Your Korean entity | Held and administered on instruction |
| Our role | Authorised signatory and reconciler | Custody and administration |
| Best for | Most operating companies | Project structures, wind-downs, dormant entities |
| Balance sheet | Stays on yours | Depends on the arrangement |
Most operating companies should keep their own accounts. The control comes from who authorises, not from who holds.
Bank reconciliation is not interesting, which is why it stops happening. It is also where errors become visible first.
We reconcile every account monthly — including the dormant ones, which is where forgotten standing orders and unnoticed fees live — and produce a reconciliation with the supporting items identified rather than a bare balance match. Unexplained differences are escalated in the month they arise, not carried forward as a reconciling item until they are a year old and nobody remembers.
That last question is the one that catches invoice-redirection fraud, which remains the most common way money leaves a small company without anyone noticing.
Expense administration works the same way: a written policy, applied consistently, with review that is evidenced. Inventory and fixed asset control follows — a register that is counted rather than assumed, and reconciled to the ledger we maintain.
Sometimes the requirement is not a permanent control layer but a person, for a period. Our qualified accountants take on financial controller or finance director responsibilities on an interim basis — covering a resignation, an integration, or the awkward stage where the entity has outgrown a bookkeeper but cannot yet justify a full-time controller.
The scope is written down at the start, including what decisions the interim can and cannot take. An interim controller with an undefined mandate is a governance problem of its own.
Operational control depends on the underlying records being current, which is why this works best combined with accounting and bookkeeping — the reconciliation is only as good as the ledger it reconciles to. Payment discipline connects directly to payroll and to the tax filing calendar, since both create fixed obligations that have to be funded on time.
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We act as an authorised signatory on your Korean bank account, so payments require authorisation from outside the local office. In practice that means a payment run is prepared locally, supported by the underlying invoices and approvals, and released by us against that evidence. It creates segregation of duties in an office too small to create it internally — which is exactly the situation where payment fraud and unauthorised spending occur. It is a control, not a convenience: we decline payments that are not supported.
Because segregation of duties requires at least two people whose interests are not aligned, and a three-person office rarely has them. When the same person raises the purchase order, receives the goods, approves the invoice and executes the payment, every standard control has collapsed into one desk. That is not a comment on anyone’s honesty — it is the definition of a control weakness, and it is the first thing an internal auditor or an acquirer will flag.
Either arrangement works. Funds can be administered in your own Korean bank accounts, with us acting as signatory and reconciling them, or deposited with us and administered on your instruction. Most clients prefer the first: the account stays in their name and on their balance sheet, and we provide the control layer over it. We will tell you which we think fits your situation and why.
Reconciling the bank statement to the ledger is a routine task, and precisely because it is routine it is the first thing a stretched local finance person stops doing properly. Making it an external, monthly, evidenced deliverable is what turns it into a control. Unreconciled accounts are where errors accumulate quietly — duplicate payments, unrecorded receipts, timing differences that turn out not to be timing differences — and by the time they surface in an audit they are a year old.
Yes. Our team includes qualified accountants who can take on financial controller or finance director responsibilities on a temporary basis — covering a departure, a parental leave, an acquisition integration, or a period where the entity has outgrown a bookkeeper but cannot yet justify a full-time hire. The scope is agreed in writing, because an interim controller with an undefined mandate helps nobody.
It usually makes their job substantially easier, and we work to that expectation. Group internal audit wants evidence that controls exist and operated: authorised payment records, monthly reconciliations with supporting documentation, a documented expense policy that was actually applied. Because those are our deliverables rather than a local by-product, they exist in a reviewable form without anyone having to reconstruct them for the audit visit.