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Samsung Pay Launches In India, Will Work With All PoS Machines And Paytm

Samsung becomes the first smartphone maker to launch its own payment service.
Andrew Kelly / Reuters

Samsung launched its own payment service, called Samsung Pay in India today. The company announced the service formally after keeping it in early access stage. Samsung Pay will be available on select Samsung Galaxy series devices.

Uniquely, in addition to the standard NFC (Near Field Communication) support, Samsung Pay also supports MST (Magnetic Secure Transaction) which is the technology used in credit and debit card swipes in PoS (point of sales) machines.

This enables users to register their credit or debit card on the app and then use it at any establishment with a PoS machine. Samsung India has partnered with Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Standard Chartered and the State Bank of India for the service. Samsung Pay has also been integrated with UPI and the Paytm wallet services.

Currently, Samsung Pay is limited by the number of devices it is available on. The phones that are Samsung Pay complaint are — Galaxy Note5, Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy S6 edge+, Galaxy A7 (2017), Galaxy A5 (2017), Galaxy A7 (2016), and Galaxy A5 (2016).

Users can just tap their Samsung phones on MST or NFC enabled PoS machines after opening the Samsung Pay app. They would then have to enter the 4-digit card PIN in MST machines and authenticate the payment.

Samsung has reiterated that to ensure user security, there will be no storage of data on the servers and all transactions will be encrypted.

"Our insights show that convenience, security and acceptance are seen by consumers as the most important influencers when choosing among different digital payment options," Asim Warsi, Senior Vice President, Mobile Business, Samsung India, said in a statement released to the press. "With Samsung Pay, we give our consumers the smartest way to make digital transactions by far. Samsung Pay is highly secure through the signatureKNOX Platform, fingerprint authentication and tokenisation. 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 launch of Samsung Pay makes Samsung the first smartphone company, ahead of Google and Apple, to launch its own payment service in India.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.