A new age of mobile payment is bound upon us – an age in which you can pay for goods with your voice. BC Card (President and CEO, Joon Hee Suh, www.bccard.com) declared on the 14th that it has developed world’s first and FIDO-based voice authentication payment technology and is currently in process of beta-testing.

Once the testing is complete, 9 million BC Card cardholders will be able to experience the new technology using their mobile payment app (mISP). Up to now, no payment technology using voice biometric authentication has been commercialized in Korea.

Using voice authentication is quite simple. Cardholder, who has their BC Card registered on mISP, presses the recording button to record the following phrase ‘Pay with my voice.’ This phrase is saved and referenced when the cardholder wants to pay with their voice. It is much simpler than the current method, typing in the 6-digit PIN code.

A notable characteristic of this service is that unlike other biometric authentication technologies, this is applicable to almost all smartphones. Whilst iris and fingerprint authentication needs a separate hardware to save and recognize the data, voice authentication only needs a built-in microphone in a smartphone.

As this technology can be used on both Android and Apple iOS, almost all consumers in Korea can use this new technology. This technology will also be available on Samsung’s mobile OS (Tizen) and other wearable devices in the near future.

The recorded voice data is encrypted and saved in a smartphone. When the cardholder actually uses it, the data will be authenticated first by the smartphone, then the FIDO server, ensuring a safer payment.

In order to develop and provide biometric authentication services, BC Card has worked with Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) from July 2014. They have built an authentication server, which meets FIDO standards, on July 2015. They have also been providing fingerprint authentication payment services to Samsung Pay since August.

BC Card is planning to implement voice authentication service on mISP first then expand it to BC Pay. Along with this, they plan to introduce face / iris authentication services.

Jung Hoon Choi, Head of BC Card’s Convergence Business Division, stated, "Among diverse biometric authentication methods, voice authentication has proven to be the most convenient and the safest method in mobile payment. BC Card will continuously develop biometric authentication technologies, provide new services that can ultimately root out fraudulent transactions, and lead the fin-tech industry."