South Korea's National Pension Service has been using artificial intelligence (AI) and big-data analysis to uncover foreign pension entitlements that citizens were unaware of, and the number of South Koreans receiving overseas pensions has now topped 7,200. The pensions they receive total 44.7 billion won (approximately $33.1 million) a year.
The National Pension Service said on the 9th that, through expanded social security agreements and its support service for filing foreign pension claims, the number of foreign pension recipients has surpassed 7,200, with annual payouts reaching 44.7 billion won, up about 10 billion won from a year earlier.
The simultaneous rise in recipients and payouts is attributable to totalization agreements — which allow the pension contribution periods of two countries to be combined so that eligibility requirements can be met — with 32 of the 42 countries with which South Korea has signed and brought into force social security agreements.
A totalization agreement is a system that lets citizens who paid into pension programs while working abroad but could not individually meet each country's minimum contribution period still receive a pension by combining their contribution records in the two countries.
The focus is on reducing the blind spots in which citizens with overseas work histories give up on applying altogether because they do not know the eligibility requirements.
Since 2025, the National Pension Service has operated three closely tailored support services to protect foreign pension entitlements. First, it invited the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) to South Korea for a second consecutive year to support in-person consultations and applications for U.S. pensions, through which more than 1,200 citizens used tailored services such as directly filing for U.S. pensions.
It also conducted proactive identification using AI and big data. The service analyzed the data it holds to single out people highly likely to be eligible for foreign pensions and, since 2025, has sent pension application guidance notices on four occasions. The aim is to reduce cases in which people miss the application window because they are unaware of their eligibility.
An online self-check channel has also been established. Through the "Foreign Pension Eligibility Check" system on the National Pension Service's website, any citizen who has paid into a pension abroad or has lived in a country such as Australia or New Zealand can check their eligibility directly.
Kim Sung-joo, chairman of the National Pension Service, said, "This is the fruit of providing closely tailored support services to citizens who could not apply for foreign pensions due to a lack of information," adding, "We will continue to use proactive administration and digital technology to ensure citizens do not miss their right to receive foreign pensions."
Meanwhile, N-GPT, the service's own generative AI service officially introduced at the end of September, is also spreading rapidly in the workplace. Within a month of its introduction, about 4,000 employees had used it, with cumulative uses surpassing 200,000. A notable feature is that it operates on an internal network separated from external networks, blocking concerns about information leaks and hacking.
The service had earlier signed a strategic business agreement with Kakao Enterprise in June and secured high-performance graphics processing unit (GPU) resources and other infrastructure for its…
