Korea’s BC Card has joined the FIDO Alliance Board of Directors.

It’s a financial institution and a partner of the Samsung Pay mPayment platform, and in a statement announcing BC Card SVP Jung Hoon Choi said his company is “the first FIDO Board member among the Asian financial institutions”. It’s also the proprietor of its own mPayment app, BC Pay, for which the company has enabled voice recognition authentication based on FIDO standards.

As such, the company could prove instrumental in helping to promote FIDO standards in the Korean market; and to that end FIDO has chosen Korea for its first interoperability test event to be hosted outside of the US, which will take place this month. That is connected to a larger collaboration between the country’s government, telecoms, and FIDO to enhance authentication services in Korea, an effort that was kicked off last autumn.

The interoperability testing event will feature the greatest number of companies implementing FIDO standards that any such FIDO event has yet seen. According to FIDO Executive Director Brett McDowell, many of the participants will in fact be Korea-based organizations, “a sign of many more FIDO Certified products and deployments coming out of the Asia-Pacific region in the very near future.”