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The Paktor team cited cultural reasons for the revamp

Singaporean dating platform Paktor announced today it has relaunched in South Korea under a new name, ‘Swipe’.

In an official press release, Co-founder and CTO of Paktor, Jing Shen Ng, said that there was a need to tweak the app’s appearances and features in order to fit the South Korean market. In other words, it needed to localise.

To that end, it set up a new office in Seoul and established a local team in order to better understand and capture local dating and market sentiments. Ng and the South Korean team conducted over 20 meet-ups with Koreans at cafes and attended several startup events to gain user insights.

Through these activities, they discovered that the brand name ‘Paktor’ bore no cultural relevance to Koreans. And since Koreans tend to associate themselves with a brand name, the team rebranded the app’s name to ‘Swipe’ – the action of liking or disliking a potential match.

The team also introduced several new additions to the app, built specifically for the Korean palate. These includes Photo Pick, where users can rate each other’s profile photos and get 10 Paktor points in return.

The new app also allows users to display other critical information such as education, job and Facebook interest groups. Besides these new features, the user interface also went through a revamp.

Also Read: Paktor bags US$10M to disrupt online dating in Japan and Korea

“It was a challenge to give the app a graphical uplift but I am really satisfied with how it turned out. The light coloured scheme actually made the app look entirely different,” said Paktor’s Head of Design, Lay Hiang Low, in an official press release.

Swipe will retain other Paktor app features including Paktor Rewards, Paktor Guess and One-Touch Gifts.

With the relaunch, Paktor now has an official presence in seven countries – Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. In the past months, it made two acquisitions: 17 media, a Taiwanese live-streaming app and American hook-up app, Down.

To date, Paktor has raised a total of US$57.5 million and has acquired over 20 million users globally.

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Image Credit: Paktor

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