BC Card (President and CEO Chae Jong-jin, www.bccard.com) made an announcement on August 23rd that it has signed an MOU on establishing a network partnership with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

NPCI is a payment settlement agency, founded by the Central Bank of India in 2008, to provide domestic ATM transaction and card services. Since the launch of a local brand called “RuPay” in 2012, it has been directly handling the domestic card business.

360 million cards have been issued under RuPay, a domestic-use-only card brand, from 823 banks in India thus far, and there are 2.5 million POSs and 230,000 ATMs in operation.

The MOU conclusion ceremony was held at the NPCI headquarters located in Mumbai, India at 4 p.m. on August 22nd (local time), in the presence of representatives of both parties including President Chae Jong-jin of BC Card, President Dilip Asbe of NPCI as well as Lim Nam-hun, the Head of Global Business Division at BC Card, and Managing Director Vishal Anand Kanvaty of NPCI.

Through the MOU, the two companies have agreed to provide services allowing transactions using ▲ domestic-use-only cards issued by BC Card in India ▲ domestic-use-only cards issued by RuPay in Korea. There are also plans to expand the areas of cooperation through the ▲ launch of BC Card-NPCI “co-branded” cards and ▲ development of new business models.

In recent years, India has been achieving rapid economic development, recording an economic growth rate of 7%, on average, yet its credit card penetration rate has been less to 30%, indicating a high growth potential for the credit card market. BC Card and NPCI plan on improving the standard of the financial services provided to their customers, based on their know-hows and technical partnership.

At the MOU conclusion ceremony, President Chae Jong-jin of BC Card said, “The fact that we have established a partnership with NPCI, the one and only credit card payment infrastructure operator in India, based on our card payment processing capacity and know-how is very encouraging. […] I hope that we will be able to provide innovative services in the payment settlement market in both countries, using our diverse FinTechs and payment settlement platforms.”

Meanwhile, President Chae announced his plans to have the “diverse solutions and platforms of BC Card be applied to the customer services of the leading companies at home and abroad as a means to support the innovation of the payment settlement industry,” during his inaugural address in March 2017.