• THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE & LAW REVIEW
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• v.58
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• pp.237-263
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• 2013

Traditionally, a L/C (letter of credit) has been known as a relatively low risk method of payment. This is why L/C has been used in international trade. However, L/C has a number of weak points such as high cost, long processing time, and complicated documents. Using an electronic L/C is one way to solve those weak points. In Korea, there are two types of electronic L/C. One is the EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) based L/C and the other one is the XML (Extensible Markup Language) based L/C. The former, established in 1990's, is sent from banks to the beneficiary solely through VAN (Value Added Network, KTNET) operators. On the other hand the latter, started in 2005, is sent from banks to KFTC (Korea Financial Telecommunications & Clearings Institute) for management of the L/C balance, as well as to KTNET. So far, paper L/C and EDI based L/C have been used overwhelmingly instead of XML based L/C in spite of the aforesaid disadvantages. In this paper, the authors examined empirically why the users of electronic L/C were reluctant to use XML based L/C. The results are as follows. First, the users of paper L/C were more dissatisfied than the users of electronic L/C due to many factors such as cost, the time required, and information reuse. Second, the users who have more experience with XML based L/C wanted to adopt integrated management with EDI based L/C more than the users who had not experienced XML based L/C. Third, the users who had used more than one form of L/C wanted to adopt integrated management to EDI and XML based L/C more than the users who had only used one form of L/C. Therefore, the authority for electronic L/C should consider a change of the policy from the XML based electronic L/C oriented to integrated management of the various types of L/C.