Samsung Pay is a digital payment service from Samsung Electronics. It allows secure mobile payments to be made at participating shops and points of sale. This service is available in the UK since May 2017. It can be downloaded from the galaxy app store on compatible Samsung devices, including the newly released the Galaxy S8, S8+ and the Note 8.
Samsung Pay has been gaining a lot of momentum in the recent days. Samsung has already got Visa and Mastercard on board. They are working on getting major banks involved too. The Co-Operative Bank is the latest one to join the list in the UK.
Samsung Pay is supported almost anywhere that you might use a credit or debit card. Currently the supported banks include First Direct, HSBC, M&S Bank, MBNA, Nationwide, Santander and now Co-operative Bank.
Samsung also has an agreement with the Transport for London. This allows the users to set a payment card as a ‘transport card’ within the app. This ‘Transport Card’ can be used on all TfL services in London. The users can just tap on their phone at the card reader, without needing to wake it or verify the transaction.
MST and NFC
Near Field Communication allows two devices placed within a few inches of each other to exchange information. NFC payments require merchants to upgrade their old terminals to NFC-enabled payment terminals. Magnetic Secure Transmission sends a magnetic signal from a compatible device to the payment terminal’s card reader.
MST payments do not require the merchant to upgrade the payment terminal, making Samsung Pay available for use at nearly all payment terminals with a card reader. Samsung Pay uses both NFC and MST to send payment information to the terminal. Both technologies are equally secure, using a unique digital card number in place of your actual payment card’s number.
Adding your Card
It is quite easy to add your card to your Samsung Pay account.It is very secure too. There are no account numbers held on the device and all sensitive data replaced with unique tokens. Payment security is also provided by Samsung Knox and ARM TrustZone, which work together to prevent fraud and data theft.
“Samsung Pay will reinvent how people pay for goods and services and transform how they use their smartphones. The secure and simple payment process, coupled with our robust partner network, makes Samsung Pay a truly game-changing service that will bring value to consumers and our partners in the ecosystem,” said JK Shin, CEO and head of IT & mobile communications at Samsung.
The application is exclusive for Samsung Phones. However, according to certain reports, Samsung Pay might be released for non-Samsung phones too. This was a problem previously, due to the need for a fingerprint or iris scanner to authorize payments, but now you can use a registered passcode instead. This might be to take on other rivel Payment Solutions like Apple Pay and Android Pay. According to MacRumors, the Samsung Pay Mini app has been rejected from Apple’s App Store, but the company is still planning an Android launch for the app. The app will supposedly be bundled with Bixby.
Compatible Devices
As of now, Samsung Pay is available on the company’s smartphones, which include the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus, Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy S6, S6 edge and S6 edge+, Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy Note 8, Galaxy A3 2017, A5 2017 are also supported, as is the Samsung Gear S3 smartwatch when paired with a compatible smartphone.
