What Is LINE and Why Do Businesses in Japan Use It?

Short Summary

LINE is Japan’s dominant messaging app, used daily by tens of millions of people for both personal and business communication, and by millions of companies for customer service, marketing, and payments. This article explains why LINE and its business product, LINE Official Account, have become central to how organizations communicate in Japan, and what regulated industries need to consider before adopting either for client communication.

Key Takeaways

• Dominant Reach: LINE is Japan’s dominant messaging platform for both personal and business use, reaching close to 98 million monthly active users.
• Business Adoption: More than 3 million companies in Japan operate LINE Official Accounts, using them for customer service, appointment reminders, payments, and marketing.
• Compliance Requirements: Banks, insurers, and other regulated organizations are legally required to capture, retain, supervise, place under legal hold, and produce client communications across every messaging app in use, including LINE.
• Native Tool Limits: A Verified LINE Official Account confirms the identity of the account holder and screens for risk to LINE’s own users, but it does not capture, retain, screen conversations for policy violations, or produce records the way regulated organizations are required to.
• Enforcement Risk: Regulated organizations whose employees converse with customers over LINE, whether through a LINE Official Account or an employee’s personal LINE account, without an additional capture and governance layer, risk failed audits, regulatory fines, and enforcement action if they cannot produce records on request.

While WhatsApp is the default consumer messaging app across much of Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia, in Japan, the app of choice is LINE. Millions of Japanese people use LINE daily to interact with family, friends, and the businesses they buy from, bank with, and rely on for everyday services.  Any company operating in the Japanese market should understand how LINE and LINE Official Account are used by businesses and their employees, and what companies in regulated industries need to know before adopting them for client communication.

What Is LINE?

LINE is Japan’s dominant messaging application, used by close to 98 million people, almost  80% of the country’s population, every month. It is also the leading messaging app in Taiwan and Thailand and is gaining popularity in Indonesia. Globally, the app serves close to 194 million monthly active users.

LINE is operated by LY Corporation, formed through the 2023 merger of Yahoo Japan and LINE Corporation. It became embedded in Japanese digital life after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, where it served as a vital emergency communication tool. Since then, usage has exploded, and it has evolved from a simple chat app into a super-app offering messaging, mobile payments, news, and shopping functionality. For any business entering or expanding in Japan, LINE is difficult to ignore.

LINE vs. LINE Official Account

LINE offers two distinct products, one targeted at daily life activities and one targeted at businesses needing to reach their customers:

• LINE – a consumer app that people use to communicate with friends, family, and increasingly, the businesses they engage with in day-to-day life.
• LINE Official Account (sometimes referred to as “a LINE business account”) – a dedicated product designed for businesses to reach their customers at scale, send out broadcasts, automated replies, and conduct customer service conversations.

Personal LINE chats are end-to-end encrypted by default through LINE’s own “Letter Sealing” protocol, while LINE Official Account conversations are delivered to a business’s own systems through LINE’s Messaging API, so the business can read and act on them directly. Many businesses use the more visible Official Account for customer service, marketing, and sales, but it is also common for individual employees to continue speaking with the same customers from their personal accounts.

Despite this difference in how the two products handle message content, neither offers the governance, capture, or retention tools regulated industries need.

Why Businesses in Japan Rely on LINE

Businesses in Japan routinely use LINE to reach their customers because it is where they already are and where they respond fastest. Most people have LINE open on their phone throughout the day, and LINE Official Account messages achieve open rates above 80%, compared to an average email open rate in Japan of roughly 32%.

Email and SMS fall short by comparison. Email has a reputation for formality and trust in Japan, but most people check it less frequently throughout the day than LINE, making it a weaker choice for time-sensitive communication. SMS never built the same following in Japan that it has elsewhere, especially as strict rules prohibit including URLs in text messages, and per-message pricing with no bulk-discount structure make it a costly channel for businesses to rely on at scale.

The combination of reach and responsiveness is why LINE has become the default channel for everyday business interactions in Japan.

How Financial Institutions and Insurers Use LINE

For many Japanese businesses, a LINE Official Account can serve as a combined customer service line, marketing channel, and booking system. Financial institutions and insurers in Japan have built much of their client communication around it, particularly in these areas:

• Customer service: Banks, insurers, and wealth managers use LINE Official Accounts to handle routine inquiries directly, such as account status checks or policy questions, often supplementing call centers and branch staff. Automated responses triage simple questions, while more complex inquiries are routed to a relationship manager or advisor within the same thread.
• Appointment reminders and notifications: Financial institutions and insurers send automated reminders for advisory meetings, loan consultations, or policy renewals, with substantially higher open rates than email.
• Payments: Through LINE Pay merchant integration and the Messaging API, organizations can send payment links for premiums, loan repayments, or service fees directly within a chat.
• Marketing: Banks and insurers use broadcast messages and official content to inform opted-in customers about new products or policy updates, subject to the same advertising and disclosure rules as any other channel.

The same functionality that makes apps like LINE convenient for financial services and other regulated businesses also invites unwanted risk. Any conversations that take place there that are not screened, captured, or supervised represent a gap in the company’s ability to ensure compliance with relevant legislation.

LINE and Regulated Communication

Banks, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and others have strict recordkeeping, supervision, and consumer protection obligations that apply to any messaging platform employees use to reach clients and customers.

In Japan, this obligation stems largely from the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (FIEA), which requires firms to maintain records of business communications with clients, and from Japan’s Act on Prevention of Transfer of Criminal Proceeds, the country’s core anti-money laundering law, which requires firms to retain transactional and communication-based records with customers to support ongoing monitoring and suspicious transaction reporting. 

The Financial Services Agency (FSA) supervises both frameworks and expects firms to produce a complete communications record on request; insurers and pharmaceutical companies face parallel obligations.

Beyond retaining records after the fact, the FSA’s guidelines on internal controls expect firms to actively prevent, not just detect, communications involving unapproved product claims, conflicts of interest, or breaches of client confidentiality, meaning inappropriate content should be caught and blocked before it is sent.

Meeting the above obligations means screening, capturing, and archiving the one-to-one conversations employees have with clients and customers over LINE and the LINE Official Account, which neither platform currently does.

Why LINE and LINE Official Account Are Not a Compliance Solution

When an employee messages a client directly from their personal LINE account rather than the firm’s official channel, no trace of the conversation remains in the organization’s systems, so it cannot be retrieved later if a regulator, auditor, or court requests it. There is also no functionality to detect and block unauthorized or inappropriate content before it’s sent, as required under supervisory frameworks such as the FSA’s guidelines on internal controls.

LINE Official Account fares no better in terms of compliance. The platform offers two tiers: unverified accounts, free with limited message volume, and Verified accounts, which pass LY Corporation’s screening of the account holder’s identity, industry, and risk to other users. But “Verified” should never be mistaken for compliant. Verification confirms who runs the account, not what was said in it, and neither tier is built to capture and retain the full range of one-to-one conversations compliance teams need.

Regulated organizations need a separate governance layer capable of screening every customer conversation in real time for policy violations and unauthorized content, and of capturing and archiving those conversations for later production.

Bringing LINE Into a Governed Communication Program

LINE, LINE Official Account, and similar business messaging tools can all provide valuable functionality for reaching customers. Yet business functionality and regulatory compliance are not one and the same. A verification badge or a limited conversation log does not provide the controls a regulated firm needs, and native capabilities vary considerably across account types and tiers. Organizations in regulated industries need a dedicated communication governance layer that spans every channel used across the business.

The LeapXpert Communications Platform enables organizations to communicate with customers through the applications they already use, while bringing those interactions into a governed enterprise environment. Communications can be captured and integrated with the organization’s existing archiving, monitoring, and compliance systems, extending the same model already applied to WhatsApp and WeChat to LINE as well.

Book a demo to learn more. 

FAQ

How many people in Japan use LINE?

LINE has close to 98 million monthly active users in Japan, covering close to 80% of the population, and serves as the country’s default channel for everyday communication with friends and family. Business use in Japan is also robust, with more than 3 million companies operating their own LINE business accounts.

Is LINE only used in Japan?

LINE is not exclusive to Japan, though Japan is its largest and most dominant market. The app also has significant user bases in Taiwan and Thailand, and smaller but active communities elsewhere in Asia. 

Outside these core markets, however, LINE’s presence drops off sharply, and organizations targeting other regions typically rely on different platforms such as WhatsApp or WeChat.

Can foreign companies set up a LINE Official Account?

Foreign companies can set up a LINE Official Account, but the account must generally be tied to a business registered in Japan and pass LINE’s own verification process. 

This registration and approval step is separate from any internal governance a regulated organization must put in place before using LINE for client communication, and firms should not assume the two are the same.

Is LINE the same as WhatsApp or WeChat?

LINE, WhatsApp, and WeChat are separate messaging platforms with different owners, dominant markets, and business account structures. 

LINE is dominant in Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand; WhatsApp is more widely used across Europe, Latin America, and other parts of Asia; and WeChat dominates mainland China. 

Enterprise tooling differs as well: LINE Official Account has no separate enterprise administration layer, WeChat pairs its business account with the enterprise product WeCom, and WhatsApp offers a business API instead of a dedicated console. None of these native tools alone provides the capture, retention, or supervision a regulated organization needs.