BC Card (CEO Lee Dong-myun) is the first financial institution to form a Data Alliance with seven PGs and VANs. Its plan is to take the lead in innovating consumer benefits based on each company's vast big data and advanced technology.

Three Payment Gateway companies, including KG INICIS, Danal, and Settlebank, and four VAN (Value-Added Network) companies including Smartro, NICE Information and Communication, KICC, and KSNET will participate in the data alliance, which will be formed around BC Card. Participating companies will continue to expand.

Under the alliance, BC Card will provide the nation's largest card payment data, while the seven participants will provide purchased item data from their sub-affiliated merchants. Each data will be processed as alias information through a specialized binding agency and exchanged and combined.

The combination of card payment data, which is used as a representative consumer trailing indicator, with purchase item data by merchant, is expected to create stronger data synergy in deducing consumers' decision-making processes and characteristics.

BC Card and seven other participants believe that combined data will serve as a basis for innovating consumer benefits as it is delivered to a variety of industries. The explanation is that more sophisticated big data releases customer-friendly products and services, which are directly linked to improving consumers' well-being.

In addition to data exchange and combination, each company is planning to discover new business areas based on MyData and continue to work together to upgrade big data technologies and industries.

Lim Se-hyun, head of BC Card's Big Data Center, said, "The eight payment companies representing South Korea have joined forces toward the goal of innovating consumer benefits. BC Card will continue to take the lead in innovating consumer benefits with differentiated big data and technology through active cooperation with each participant."

Meanwhile, BC Card was selected by the Ministry of Science and ICT in July last year as the organizer of the nation's first financial data exchange, the Financial Big Data Platform. BC Card, along with a number of companies and startups, including 10 data centers on the financial big data platform in charge of telecommunications, insurance, loans, commercial districts and social affairs, provides big data data for local governments, small and medium-sized businesses and startups.