CHANGWON — South Gyeongsang Province has begun preparations for the "Gyeongnam Resident Membership Card," the top welfare pledge of Governor Park Wan-su's administration. The program would bundle transportation, culture and welfare services now scattered across separate schemes into a single card, with a phased rollout planned from the second half of 2028.
The province held a policy briefing on the card at its main conference room on the 14th, attended by relevant provincial departments, the 18 cities and counties in the province, and the Gyeongnam Institute. Participants discussed the functions and benefits to be included and how to link existing policy services.
The card is designed as an integrated living platform that would let residents aged 18 and older access public and private benefits matched to their eligibility and circumstances through a single card. The province said the core aim is to connect policy services now split across areas such as transportation, culture and welfare, and to broaden universal benefits that ordinary residents can feel, moving beyond selective support targeted at specific groups.
The project is the first item Governor Park listed among his welfare pledges. Benefits in the pledge include the Gyeongnam Pass for transportation, welfare vouchers, a 30-50% reduction in public parking fees, a 20% discount at sports and cultural facilities, full exemption from public transit fares for pregnant women, discounts of 10-20% on checkups at partner hospitals, and discounts on movies and shopping. The plan also calls for a dedicated app in which residents accumulate health mileage from activities such as walking, along with volunteer mileage, to be used like cash. For people in their 40s and 50s carrying support and child-rearing burdens, the province envisions "4050 Cheer-Up Points" worth 100,000 won per person a year for up to three years.
At the briefing, officials reviewed not only discounts at public facilities but also which existing individual cards, vouchers and policy allowances could be consolidated into or linked with the membership card. They also heard views from the cities and counties on the possibility of linking the card to local currency platforms.
The province plans to firm up the card's functions and benefits after conducting a resident survey and gathering expert opinion. It will finalize the business model through a policy research contract next year, then put in place the legal framework and build the system before beginning a phased rollout in the second half of 2028.
"The resident membership card is not simply a card that offers discounts, but a project to build a Gyeongnam-style integrated living platform that connects residents more easily and conveniently to the policies and services they need," said Hwang Ju-yeon, director of the province's economy and business division. "We will communicate closely with the cities and counties to include benefits that residents actually need and can feel in their daily lives."
Other metropolitan governments have similar programs. In November 2017, Seoul created the "Seoul Citizen Card" app, which consolidated plastic membership cards for city- and district-run public facilities into a mobile card. It offered electronic discount coupons for restaurants near those facilities and recruited partner businesses in culture, books, education, daily life and health. Since October last year, the city has merged its public service apps into an integrated platform called "Seoul On," which provides membership cards for public facilities, eligibility verification cards for families with multiple children and for pregnant women, electronic certificate issuance, and administrative and daily-life information services.
Gyeonggi Province offers a mobile electronic residency card, the "Resident Card," within "Gyeonggi TtokD," a mobile administrative services app launched in 2022. Users can present it to enter public facilities without separate supporting documents and receive discounts.
Both platforms, however, have been criticized for being inconvenient to use and for low usage rates. That has prompted calls for South Gyeongsang Province to prepare measures addressing those weaknesses.
