South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics on Wednesday announced the launch of its mobile payments service, Samsung Pay, in India.
Using the payment method, one can simply tap and pay using their registered credit and debit cards—Samsung Pay has partnered issuers and card networks such as Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, State Bank of India, Standard Chartered Bank, Visa, MasterCard and American Express. Citibank will soon go live on the platform.
Besides, it has also integrated mobile wallet Paytm and the government’s unified payments interface (UPI) into the app. Powered by Axis Bank, the Samsung Pay UPI solution facilitates peer-to-peer transfer of funds between bank accounts on a mobile platform.
The payment service is, however, available only on the Galaxy line of phones: S7 edge, S7, Note 5, S6 edge+, A5 (2016), A7 (2016), A5 (2017) and A7 (2017). It will soon be available on the Samsung Gear S3 smartwatch.
Users can also make payments by simply waving their Samsung smartphone near a point-of-sale (PoS) terminal instead of swiping a credit/debit. To launch the NFC-based (Near Field Communication) service, a user needs to swipe up on a Galaxy phone, select the card, authenticate using fingerprint or PIN and bring the device close to the PoS terminal.
Samsung Pay also works on its patented Magnetic Secure Transmission technology, which replicates a card swipe by transmitting magnetic waves from the supported device to a standard card reader.
The platform has three levels of security—fingerprint authentication, card tokenisation and the company's mobile security platform Samsung KNOX.
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