Forming Consortium with E1, Lotte Card, BC Card, and Smartro

KT has formed a consortium with E1, Lotte Card, BC Card, and Smartro at KT's Gwanghwamun Building East headquarters and signed a business agreement to promote pilot project development and commercialization cooperation in the connected car commerce sector.

KT and specialized companies from ICT, financial, and energy/charging sectors have agreed to cooperate in the following areas: ▲ development of vehicle payment service scenarios, ▲ joint R&D of pilot project technologies, ▲ expansion of infrastructure for commercialization, ▲ joint marketing and promotion.

Connected car commerce is a service that supports automatic payment after drivers use services at charging stations/gas stations, parking lots, takeout restaurants, etc., without presenting a separate physical card, making the vehicle itself a unique payment method. Additionally, by confirming the vehicle's precise location, drivers can use services without needing to separately notify their arrival.

The consortium plans to first conduct a connected car commerce pilot project targeting E1 charging station customers, providing automatic membership discounts and payment services, and then expand services to other offline stores and online content areas across the entire commerce sector.

Existing domestic connected car commerce services faced limitations in service expansion due to providing payment services through manual location verification or requiring infrastructure construction costs for vehicle location recognition at each merchant. The KT consortium provides automatic payment services based on KT Convergence Technology Institute's DGPS*(Differential GPS) positioning technology, eliminating the need for separate location recognition equipment installation at partner merchants and allowing customers to conveniently use services. Therefore, it is more advantageous for spreading the connected car commerce ecosystem compared to existing technologies.

Additionally, KT plans to provide stable in-vehicle payment services by utilizing BC Card's payment platform and Smartro's payment infrastructure, which are financial settlement group companies. In particular, BC Card adds stability and convenience to the platform through payment technologies specialized in mobile and IoT, including its self-developed tokenization security solution and FIDO-based biometric payment authentication, which was Korea's first. Furthermore, by combining its existing payment-related big data with new data accumulated through this pilot project, it plans to provide new value to future connected car commerce users.

E1, Korea's No.1 LPG specialty company, already provides customer-customized services across Car Life on the basis of its "Orange Card" membership point service, including car insurance, LPG vehicle long-term rental services, and LPG specialty quick maintenance networks, and is currently leading the energy industry in constructing smart charging stations that encompass next-generation convenient payment and communications, creating additional synergies expected with connected car commerce.

Lotte Card also provides automatic payment methods using DGPS technology in connected car vehicles through this agreement. In the future, it plans to provide services at various merchants beyond charging stations/gas stations where customers can order and receive products without leaving their vehicles.

KT Platform Business Planning Head Kim Hyung-wook stated, "The KT consortium aims to develop services that can provide actual convenience from the perspectives of affiliated partner merchants and customers through pilot projects," and added, "With future integration into infotainment systems through AI voice recognition linkage and advancement through integrated payment platform connections, business opportunities for 'GiGA drive,' an infotainment service-exclusive platform, are expected to expand."