Samsung Pay to launch in India in first half of 2017

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Samsung plans to launch its Samsung Pay mobile payment solution in India in the first half of 2017, according to a person familiar with the matter Mashable Reports.

For bringing Samsung Pay in India, the company has partnered with American Express (Amex), said the person, adding that the company may be exploring opportunities with giants such as Visa and MasterCard as well.

American Express has been one of the partners of Samsung for the epayment solutions in several other regions including the USA, South Korea and Australia. Elsewhere, Samsung has also partnered with MasterCard and Visa, the two financial services companies that see billions of transactions worldwide on their networks every year.

Samsung began testing the service in India in December last year. Earlier this week, the South Korean technology company rolled out an update to the Galaxy Note5 smartphone in India which included the Samsung Pay app.

Samsung Pay, which rivals Android Pay and Google Pay, uses NFC-equipped point-of-sale terminals for some of its features. That would have been a hard sell as it would require Samsung to convince merchants across the country to upgrade their existing point-of-sale machines. Most of the point-of-sale devices in India don’t support NFC.

But interestingly, Samsung Pay also supports MST (Magnetic Secure Transmission), a technology that allows it to send a magnetic signal from a compatible device to the payment terminal’s card reader. This allows the smartphone to mimic a physical card, enabling the vast majority of existing terminals to support Samsung Pay as well.

 

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