South Korea’s card firm will adopt fingerprint recognition service to authenticate cardholders’ identity when making online payments via credit cards

May 16, 2014 Leave a comment

Fingerprint recognition to authenticate cardholders’ identity for online payment

Lee Yoo-sup

2014.05.11 18:07:25

South Korea’s card firm will adopt fingerprint recognition service to authenticate cardholders’ identity when making online payments via credit cards. This is the first-ever of its kind in the nation’s financial industry. 
Shinhan Card will use finger recognition system as an alternative to digitally-signed certificate for payments at domestic and overseas online shopping malls, according to sources in the financial industry Sunday.
A financial industry official noted, “when making credit and check card payments worth over 300,000 won ($292) or above, there should be an alternative to verify cardholders’ identification aside from digitally-signed certificate,” adding “Shinhan Card will be the first to introduce finger print recognition service to authenticate cardholders’ identity via smartphones.”
At the meeting to examine regulatory reform in March, President Park Geun-hye noted, “overseas customers including the Chinese are denied access to purchase coats exhibited in Korea’s drama because they aren’t entitled to digitally-signed certificate.” In response, the financial watchdog decided to abolish the mandatory use of the certificate through the revision of the oversight for e-financial regulation.
A Shinhan Card official noted, “our talk with the finger recognition service agency has been completed,” adding “upon the set-up of infrastructure and test period, the new system will be in place from this July.”
With the latest move, other players including Samsung Card, Hyundai Card and Kookmin Card will likely follow suit of Shinhan Card which commands the nation’s largest card market share.
The introduction will benefit foreigners who do not possess registration number and thus cannot issue digitally-signed certificate. Locals will be allowed to choose between traditional form of digitally-signed certificate or finger print recognition for their authentication.

Filed under Macro Trends, TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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