BC Card (CEO and President Lee Mun-hwan, www.bccard.com) revealed on the 26th that a FIDO¹-based general-purpose facial authentication service would be introduced for the first time in Korea.

FIDO-based facial authentication service is provided in the order of ① datafication of characteristics that can be extracted from the faces of customers ② image/video material reading through facial movements upon authentication and ③ confirmation with the data registered initially by the member.

BC Card’s facial authentication service increased the generality by using the smartphone camera unlike the existing services that could only be used in certain devices equipped with infrared recognition cameras².

Moreover, the service can be provided regardless of the Operation System of the smart phone and it has enhanced the convenience as the service can be used in environment in which it is difficult to use other biometric recognition services such as fingerprint and voice due to the dryness/wetness of fingerprint, external noise and others.

Security has been reinforced as authentication involves two stages, facial authentication method of recording facial expression or motion (liveness checking method) and FIDO-authentication method which verifies whether the device requested for authentication by the member matches the device that has initially been registered.

Currently, the facial authentication service can be used as an authentication method when logging into ‘paybooc’ app and in the future, it is expected to be expanded to other payment services.

Kim Jin Cheol, the head of Marketing Division of BC Card (executive director) revealed that “Facial authentication is a biometric authentication method that can be highly utilized in the future” and that “We have launched the facial authentication service in order to provide diverse and advanced services to BC cardholders”.

Meanwhile, in 2016, BC Card has been appointed as a first Asian financial institute member of the board of director of FIDO, an international standards-based inter-operable authentication association and is providing payment/authentication services through various biometric authentication such as fingerprints and voices.

¹FIDO(Fast IDentity Online): International standards organization that has been established by Google, Microsoft, Paypal, Samsung Electronics, ETRI, Crutialtec and others in 2012 in order to develop and disseminate convenient and safer user authentication standard technology in online environment by utilizing biometric recognition technologies

²Can be used in Android Version 4.4 and above, iOS 5S and above equipped with camera in the front as well as majority of smartphones launched after 2014