Momentum for FIDO Builds in Korea as BC Card is Appointed to Board

Brett McDowell, Executive Director

The FIDO Alliance is very happy to announce that BC Card has been appointed to our Board of Directors. Right now, we’re seeing a great deal of innovation in authentication and biometrics coming out of Korea, and with that is coming a lot of demand for FIDO authentication.

BC Card is a great example of an innovator driving and expanding the use of open FIDO standards for authentication in Korean financial services. BC Card is a partner of Samsung Pay in Korea, which enables consumers to use FIDO(R) Certified fingerprint authentication for in-store and online payments. BC Card also uses FIDO standards to enable voice recognition authentication to replace PINs for its own in-store payment app, BC Pay.

BC Card will bring this experience and expertise to the FIDO Alliance board, and help raise awareness and promote the benefits of FIDO authentication in Korea and other markets in the Asia-Pacific region.

“As well as giving the payment service utilizing biometrics authentication, we will do our best to give the highest value to our customers through the collaboration with global companies in various industries,” said Jung Hoon Choi, senior vice president of BC Card and new FIDO Alliance board representative. “As the first FIDO Board member among the Asian financial institutions, BC Card will lead more comfortable and secure payment services based on FIDO technologies. BC Card has been actively driving market innovation, introducing a FIDO-based BC Pay voice authentication system, which is the first such application in the world, and Samsung Pay fingerprints authentication system. We are pleased to join the FIDO Alliance. Together with the FIDO Alliance, we look forward to delivering comfort and security to customers’ payment experience.”

I expect to see continuing growth in this strong momentum we’re seeing throughout Asia-Pacific, in terms of both FIDO certifications and deployments from leading technology and service providers. This week, we will host our the first ever Korean-based interoperability testing event, which will feature the largest number of of FIDO implementer companies we have ever had in a single testing event. These companies, many of which are based in Korea, will be gathering to test and validate their FIDO implementations truly interoperate with each other.

This is a sign of many more FIDO Certified products and deployments coming out of the Asia-Pacific region in the very near future. Follow @FIDOAlliance on Twitter and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date as we highlight more of this news in the coming months.  Also keep tabs on other important developments as myriad of companies and governments throughout the region deliver simpler, stronger authentication solutions using FIDO standards.