Product descriptions:
In South Korea’s highly competitive payments market — where credit and debit card penetration ranks among the highest in the world — data and AI-driven innovation are advancing rapidly. To maintain their leadership in the domestic payments industry, BC Card set out to harness their vast data resources to deliver faster, smarter customer experiences. Specifically, the company wanted to generate real-time insights into consumer activity and spending behavior to identify new growth opportunities in emerging segments, such as foreign transactions. However, fragmented legacy systems made it difficult to access and act on data quickly, limiting both operational efficiency and responsiveness. Eager to overcome these challenges, BC Card adopted the Databricks Platform to unify data across the enterprise, streamlining access, improving performance and ultimately achieving a 60% reduction in platform operation costs.
Overcoming data bottlenecks that hindered innovation
Serving more than 40 client companies and 36 million members, BC Card delivers a wide range of services that support both businesses and consumers — from issuing branded cards and processing transactions to providing marketing insights and developing new payment products. To enhance these services, the company needed real-time visibility into consumer behavior, spending patterns and emerging growth segments. They also applied AI to their workflows to solve challenges that improve customer satisfaction across the board.
Although BC Card managed enormous volumes of data, they lacked an efficient environment to fully leverage it. The company’s systems were siloed, with data search, processing, analysis and visualization all separated. Without a centralized platform to access data beyond their main relational database, teams struggled to find and act on the information needed to support business operations quickly.
Internal teams relied on inconsistent methods to access data — using OLAP tools and dashboards, or running direct queries within internal systems. This fragmented approach created inefficiencies and made performance heavily dependent on each employee’s individual data skills. As a result, operational staff struggled to perform analysis or modeling on their own, often requiring help from data specialists. These bottlenecks added up significantly and caused delays in daily work and, ultimately, customer inconvenience. Hamin Kim, Head of Data Planning at BC Card, explained, “Structural limitations like these significantly slowed problem-solving and became a major cause of technical stagnation.”
Aiming to face these challenges head-on, BC Card explored integrated solutions that could simplify maintenance, lower data storage costs and modernize their legacy information systems. After evaluating multiple options, the company chose the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform as the most effective foundation for unifying data management across the organization and driving AI innovation.
Realizing data democratization with an integrated data solution
By adopting Databricks, BC Card integrated their previously separate data searching, processing, analysis and visualization environments into a single platform built on Delta Lake. This foundation unified disparate data sources into a reliable, high-performance environment, enabling teams to access and analyze information in real time. The investment enabled consistent data management and significantly improved efficiency and productivity across all operations.
Because external AI services cannot be easily applied in highly regulated financial environments, BC Card utilized Mosaic AI to securely bring advanced automation and intelligence into their internal workflows. With Mosaic AI, the company developed an AI agent capable of learning from metadata and usage patterns to help business users and analysts quickly locate and use relevant data — a key step toward true data democratization. Through Databricks SQL, teams now easily query, visualize and share insights without relying on data specialists, empowering employees across the business to participate in data-driven decision-making. Business units can directly manage activities — such as marketing target extraction, near real-time performance monitoring and data-driven growth marketing — through Databricks’ comprehensive platform.
Adding Unity Catalog into their Databricks tech stack strengthened data security and governance through user-level permission controls, column-level access management and data masking rules. By embedding de-identification adequacy standards within Databricks, the company now complies with Korea’s three major data protection laws: the Personal Information Protection Act, the Network Act and the Credit Information Act. Transitioning from an on-premises system to a cloud-based platform has also enabled BC Card to respond more flexibly and rapidly to evolving business needs, such as expanding data capacity. Additionally, Databricks’ open architecture allows seamless integration with BC Card’s existing on-premises AI systems, ensuring consistent and efficient data utilization across future multicloud environments.
Organizational collaboration has also improved considerably. Data science, engineering and analytics teams can now conduct analysis, development and operations within a single, unified platform, breaking down silos and improving communication. Furthermore, Databricks’ training and certification programs empower both data experts and non-specialists to explore data and develop simple AI agents independently. “Through Databricks, we are finally realizing true data democratization and accelerating digital innovation across the organization,” Hamin concluded.
Driving efficiency, savings and smarter decisions across payments
Since adopting Databricks, BC Card has achieved remarkable gains in data efficiency and overall business performance. The time required for data processing has been reduced by 90%, from initial extraction to post-processing, which has dramatically improved employee responsiveness to trends and, in turn, customer satisfaction. Enhanced data reliability has lowered the costs associated with marketing data errors by more than 50%, while migrating from the company’s legacy big data platform to Databricks has cut operational expenses by over 60% through usage-based cost management. These improvements have reduced inefficiencies and created new mid- to long-term revenue opportunities.
Beyond efficiency gains, Databricks has enabled BC Card to transform the way teams engage with data across the organization. By unifying systems and automating manual processes, BC Card has enabled their business units to work more independently for faster analysis and execution. Analysts and operational teams alike can now explore, build and apply AI solutions directly to their daily tasks, which has paved the way toward increasing company-wide data democratization.
Building the foundation for AI-driven growth and agent democratization
Building on their success, BC Card plans to further expand AI-driven automation and innovation across the organization. The company is expanding their use of Databricks to fuel AI-based data mart creation and automated reporting, eliminating repetitive tasks and improving operational agility. They will also continue to develop new use cases informed by user data patterns to anticipate business needs, strengthen customer engagement and pioneer the next generation of digital payment experiences.