Russia’s national payment system, ‘Mir’ – JSC ‘NSPK’ and giant electronics company, Samsung, have partnered to connect the Mir payment system to Samsung’s mobile payment service called Samsung Pay.
This partnership announcement followed after discovering Mir cards would be more successful if connected via mobile. Previously, some pilot tests had been done with national cards issuing banks like Rosselkhozbank, Chelindbank, Opening and Center-Invest; in conjunction with vendors of transactions and payment processing solutions like OpenWay, TSYS and Compass Plus participating. Plans are in place to make this Samsung Pay and Mir technological solution fully available in 2018 to participating banks.
Here’s what Vladimir Komlev, General Director of JSC NSPC had to say about the announcement: “Payment with the help of mobile payment services is rapidly gaining popularity in our country. The number of tokens in Russia in January-November 2017 increased 9-fold. The NSCP together with its partners is constantly working to make the Mir card modern and technological, and payments on it are as convenient as possible. We are confident that our partner banks will soon begin to connect Mir cards to Samsung Pay, and the holders of Mir cards will appreciate the convenience of paying with the help of this service.”
Adding to what Vladimir said, Dmitry Gostev, head of Samsung Mobile in Russia, said: “80% of users of devices that support Samsung Pay, start using the service immediately after purchase, and every second buyer of compatible devices called the support of mobile payment service as one of the key factors for making a purchasing decision. We are progressively developing the ecosystem of Samsung Pay’s partners and believe that the addition of the national payment system World to the service will make it available to more users of Samsung devices.”
While Samsung Pay is meant for contactless payments, it doesn’t bar Mir cardholders from using it in other terminals. This is made possible because Samsung Pay has both Near Field Communication (NFC) and Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST), thus a non-contactless payment terminal would read the device like an ordinary bank card with a magnetic stripe or chip.
The customer base for the Samsung Pay and Mir solution is over 28 million strong and growing daily. Moreover, using a co-baiting system, Samsung Pay also works outside the country for Russians.
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