The largest payments processor in South Korea, BC Card, announced that it is making use of blockchain technology for settling reward points.

The underlying technology for this processor is given by KT, the majority owner of BC Card, and the country’s second-biggest telecom firm.

Thanks to a KT Hyperledger Fabric-based offering, BC Card is able to manage the exchanging and ordering of the points paid out by the vouchers, affinity partners, and VIP points. Advanced applications like managing documents and settling payments have not been achieved thus far.

BC Card is known to have been handling rewards manually. In early 2019, it started to develop a blockchain application to operate the work. It now provides access of appropriate ledgers to rewards partners so that settling payments become seamless and automated.

The company claims to have achieved many benefits. Errors have been dramatically decreased and the processing time has gone down by 50%. The article notes that the company intends on applying blockchain to more applications in the second half of the year, without disclosing any details.

KT has been an early adopter and an active proponent of blockchain technologies. The firm, having NTT Docomo as one of its largest shareholders, introduced its blockchain network in July last year.

According to an announcement made last month, it is going to be one among the consortium, along with Samsung Electronics, various large banks, and relevant telecom firms, to create a blockchain-based system for the purpose of digital identification.

Currently, the company’s primary focus is to leverage blockchain over its new 5G network, and introduced its 5G GIGA Chain in April 2019.

The financial institutes in Korea are all eyeing to apply blockchain for consumer credit. In July, Shinhan Card announced that it has issued a patent to develop a blockchain system for enabling card-less payment transactions. The Woori Financial Group announced earlier this month that it had partnered with Kakao’s public blockchain platform, Ground X, to use for the settlements of Woori Card.