Facial recognition service aims to stamp out proxy attendance at hagwon

A facial recognition attendance service designed to eliminate proxy attendance at hagwon and let operators focus on education has entered the market.

BH Soft announced Wednesday the official launch of FacePass, its new facial recognition attendance service.

FacePass is integrated with the company's hagwon management platform EduOK and its mobile attendance and payment service Chulgyeol Talk. The service was developed through a strategic partnership with Toss Place, a payment terminal subsidiary of fintech firm Toss, marking an expansion of fintech into the education technology sector.

When a student approaches a hagwon kiosk, FacePass automatically recognizes the registered face and processes check-in or check-out in about one second — no attendance code required. The system's recognition accuracy stands at 99.9 percent.

The service links BH Soft's hagwon management system with Toss Place's authentication technology and infrastructure in real time. Once a student's face is verified, a security server immediately checks for forgery or tampering before transmitting the data to BH Soft, which then automatically sends a notification to parents and updates the hagwon's attendance records.

Hagwon already using EduOK and Chulgyeol Talk will receive the FacePass feature at no charge, lowering the barrier to adoption by eliminating additional costs. Students and hagwon that do not use FacePass can continue using the existing numeric code verification method or choose between the two.

"We have built a financial-grade security system to protect sensitive personal information," BH Soft CEO So Byeong-hyeok said. "We applied liveness detection technology that identifies and blocks in real time any authentication attempts using photos, videos or masks. We also applied HTTPS (TLS) communication and double encryption across all transmission channels to enhance security reliability."