Samsung Pay is Now Officially Available in India; Supports PayTM

Early this year, Samsung teased the launch of its mobile payment service 'Samsung Pay' in India. Now today, the South Korean giant has officially launched the service for India's Samsung device users. It has rolled out with support for banks -- Axis, HDFC, ICICI, SBI, and Standard Chartered, and credit and debit cards from MasterCard and Visa.

Samsung will adding support for more banks including Citibank and American Express in the coming weeks. Interestingly, users in India can also add their Paytm wallet accounts in the Samsung Pay app. Notably, PayTM is India’s largest fintech startup and mobile wallet with 200 million registered users.

Samsung Pay uses both NFC and MST (magnetic secure transmission) to make wireless payments. All you need to tab the phone to the payment terminal, touch the fingerprint scanner for authentication, and you’re done. There is a support for NFC, but we’re not aware how many places in India will have support for NFC-based payment solutions.

The biggest limitation of Samsung Pay however is the list of the devices that will support Samsung Pay service. As the service is currently available only on -- Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy S6 edge+, Galaxy A7 (2016) and Galaxy A5 (2016). Both the Galaxy A7 (2017) and Galaxy A5 (2017).

This payment service launch by Samsung is indeed a step beyond Apple, which has not yet released its Apple Pay service in India. Speaking on a visit to India last year, CEO Tim Cook said the iPhone maker intends to bring Apple Pay to India but it seems that India is not on priority for Apple as of now as the company is more keen for other Asian countries as Apple Pay has already been rolled out in Hong Kong, France, Singapore and Japan among others.

Samsung is the first company to launch a mobile payment service in India, and by doing this Samsung Pay service has reached total of 13 countries, including China, the U.S. and Korea.

Other than Apple and Samsung, Google is yet another player that offers a mobile payment platform in the form of Android Pay.

Samsung To Launch 'Samsung Pay', Its Mobile Payment in India

Post the demonetisation announcement, India saw the popularity of its mobile payment service sector increasing by many folds. While the already existing players in the market jumped to action to cash on the opportunity, several new one came up to get a piece of the pie. And now, it seems, Samsung is all ready to debut itself mobile payment service called Samsung Pay in India very soon.

While the tech biggie hasn't made an official announcement about the launch yet, but it did drop in some hints recently.

Yesterday, Samsung rolled out the much-awaited Android Nougat update to its Galaxy S7 and S7 edge devices. The users, when turned on their devices after the update was completed, saw a message saying “The future of payments is coming soon!” This signalled that Samsung has something planned for making payments by mobile sleeker than ever in India. At the top of it, the Nougat update also brought the Samsung Pay app to the company’s flagship devices, cementing the earlier signal that said the future of payments is coming soon to India.

Samsung seems to have adopted tease but don't say anything strategy for launching Samsung Pay in India, and as far we can say and assess, it surely is proving out to be a huge success and has got many people interested in what's coming.

Samsung Pay has been having a good run in a lot of countries around the world and has acquired a unique status in the global mobile payment service sector. One of the things that makes it stand out from the rest in the market is the fact that it makes use of both Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) as well as NFC. For the unversed, MST supports supports older magnetic credit card machines as well. Both NFC and MST support makes Samsung Pay compatible with a majority of card readers and hence users will be able to make use of the service in a majority of restaurants, shops, and petrol pumps etc. across the nation.

Keep watching this space to know the exact date when Samsung Pay will hit the Indian market.

[Top Image: cbronline.com]