Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Hyeon Een]

When you receive a bill one way to pay is by bank transfer. The bill usually lists several different bank accounts you can pay it in to so that you can use your own bank and thus save yourself a 1,000won fee or so.

How does the company receiving the money know the money is yours? Does each company have thousands and thousands of bank accounts, so that the acct no. I pay in to is unique to me? If one opens a business bank account here do they ask you how many unique bank account numbers you want?

[seoulsucker]

Businesses may have accounts with different banks for customer convenience, but I don't think they set up a private deposit account for each customer. That would be a logistics nightmare.

This is how it works, I think. When you send the money via bank transfer, there is other data sent along that they can use to cross-reference.

I think in most cases, they can just match up the name on the account with the name on the transfer the first time, register it, and then just let "the system" do the work.

[air76]

Yes....they literally have a different number for each customer.

Obviously they don't really open a separate account for each customer and there is some other system in place for dealing with the logistics. But yes, the account number that you transfer money into is unique to your account.

You can rest assured that you will have your payment credited to your account and it won't get lost in the shuffle.

[Clockout]

Is there a way to pay utilities bills at the ATM or do I have to see a teller?

[air76]

Every bill should have a section with account numbers to pay via ATM. So, yes.

[ChinaBoy]

[Jammer113]

When I lived in my old apartment, I would get one bill for cleaning that could NOT be done through an atm. It needed a special machine that was inside the bank. It was a real pain in the butt as my wife and I always work until 5pm. So we would always get my wife's sister to pay the bill.

I never handled it, so maybe someone else can talk about how you tell the difference between the bills you can use an ATM with and those you can't.

Having said that, as my wife's sister always payed using her own bank account, and it was always accredited to me.. it's pretty clear that you can use any bank account to pay your bills.

Also, when you buy stuff online, you have an option to pay via atm at the bank. We frequently do this so that we don't have to verify our credit cards (whose verification system apparently doesn't get along with windows vista very well)... when you do that, it gives you an account number to send your money to. When that account is payed, they ship the product. As that's the case, the banks probably have some way of randomly generating accounts for businesses to receive money.