After a long row of leaks and beta tests, Samsung has finally launched its very own mobile payments system — Samsung Pay in India. Samsung Pay was previously launched for those who registered under the early access program in the country, a couple of weeks ago. However, today it is rolled out at a national level and can be accessed by every Samsung user fulfilling the minimum requisites.
The application has been rolled out with support for leading banks including Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, SBI, and Standard Chartered Bank. Samsung previously said that it was engaged in talks with Citibank and has managed to board the bank on the app as well. American Express has also been included for this official launch.
Samsung has partnered with Paytm to give users an added advantage over their credit or debit card usage. This partnership takes on Android Pay and Apple Pay, which are already established players in the market and hence positions itself strongly against them.
[mks_pullquote align=”left” width=”300″ size=”24″ bg_color=”#dd3333″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]Samsung Pay brings along support for RuPay cards and UPI as well[/mks_pullquote]Samsung Pay is supported by selected phones 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 should’ve received the app automatically on their devices through a software update; whereas new releases will come with Samsung Pay pre-installed on their devices. This mobile payments solution also works with the Gear S3 smartwatch.
Announcing the launch in India, Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog said,
Because Samsung Pay has all the cards (Visa, Mastercard), wallets like Paytm and UPI all integerated into one making things simple and secure at the same time, it is easily amongst the most revolutionary technologies in India right now.
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. Overall it incorporates three levels of security: biometric, card tokenization (instead of storing actual card details) and Knox platform.
For making a payment, a user simply has to link his bank account and card to the Samsung App. Post that waving/tapping their phone over an NFC-enabled point-of-sale (POS) machine would automatically initiate the payment. The payment authetication system will, however require a PIN or fingerprint access prior to transfer of money.
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.
