From V. Sudhakshina
New Delhi, March 25 2017: Samsung, a name usually connected with electronic appliances and smart-phones, recently launched its digital payment solution, Samsung Pay in India. Announced two years ago, this solution is already available in 12 other markets including South Korea, the U.S, China, Singapore, Spain, etc. The demonetization move by the Indian government has paved way to large-scale digital transactions, which is also leading to new financial technologies and solutions around digital payments and Samsung is tapping the opportunity at the right time.
At the launch event, Thomas Ko, Global General Manager, Samsung Pay said, “Exciting movements like modernization, digitization, and transformation is happening now in India. The country is going at a full speed in digital transaction, which is not seen anywhere else in the world at this pace and that is why it’s (Samsung Pay) perfect in India now.”
“We are catalyzing the digitization in India,” added Asim Warsi, Senior Vice President, Mobile Business, Samsung India.
|He further said, “With Samsung Pay, we give our consumers the smartest way to make digital transactions by far. Samsung Pay is highly secure through the signature KNOX Platform, fingerprint authentication and tokenization. We have partnered with major banks and card networks to give our consumers the widest range of choices, and are working on bringing more and more partners on board soon”
The solution allows users to make payments via their debit cards, credit cards and digital wallets by waving their Samsung devices near merchant’s payment terminal. An individual holding multiple cards can aggregate all of them in the Samsung Pay app and choose to pay from any of them without using the physical card. The solution supports Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) technology and Near Field Communication (NFC) that help in wirelessly transmitting magnetic waves from a smart phone to the payment terminal. For security it comes with fingerprint authentication, card tokenization and Samsung’s proprietary KNOX.
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To launch Samsung Pay, a user needs to swipe up on an eligible Samsung Galaxy smartphone, select the card, authenticate using a fingerprint or PIN and bring the phone near the Point of Sale terminal.
Current partners supporting this solution include PayTM, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, SBI Card and Standard Chartered Bank. The company said that in near future it will announce other bank partnerships too, which includes Citibank India. Samsung is also planning to include the Unified Payment Interface, a payment system launched by National Payments Corporation of India.
Samsung Pay is currently available on Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy S7, Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6 edge+, Galaxy A5 (2016), Galaxy A7 (2016), Galaxy A5 (2017) and Galaxy A7 (2017). It will soon be compatible with the Gear S3 Smartwatch.