Samsung started accepting early registrations for its mobile payment service, Samsung Pay in India the last week. The Korean giant has now launched the payments solution in the country, however only for those who registered under the early access program. In a move to position itself against Android Pay and Apple Pay, Samsung has partnered with Paytm to give users an added advantage. The said partnership aims to increase convenience and popularity among the 200 million users for Paytm.
The application has rolled out with support from leading banks including Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, SBI, and Standard Chartered Bank. The company is engaged in talks with Citibank which will soon land on the app as well. The website further states extension of American Express to the lineup in the near future.
Samsung Pay is supported by selected phone of the Galaxy lineup, namely Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6 edge+, Galaxy A5 (2016), and Galaxy A7 (2016). The mobile devices compatible with Samsung Pay have received the app automatically on their devices through a recent software update.
Currently, Samsung Pay processes transactions from Mastercard and Visa debit and credit cards issued by the aforementioned banks. Including India, Samsung Pay is now available in 13 countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Russia, Malaysia, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, and the United States. The service started in 2015 from South Korea, gradually making its way to U.S. and crawled to other destinations as well.
The service supports both NFC-based mobile payment systems as well as those that only support magnetic stripes. It makes the service functional at almost every POS terminal. The payments can also be completed via fingerprint scanning or through mobile verification codes. While the mentioned security measures are based on Samsung Knox and ARM TrustZone technologies; user credit card info is stored in a secure token.
The Korean giant is currently working on the extension of yet another payment service application, ‘Samsung Pay Mini’ which not only conducts digital payments but acts as a multi-platform service. The beta version of the app was out from February 6th in Korea, available for download on the Google Play Store. Samsung is yet to reveal launch dates for other countries, though nothing is finalised. The said service is also functional on other Android phones running Android Lollipop or above and having a screen resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels or higher.
