If you live in India and have been waiting for the time when your smartphone can be used to make purchases online and offline, well now is your time to shine. Samsung Pay has finally, officially gone live. While they launched the early access program just last week, they have now officially made it available for those with compatible Samsung devices. They have a big advantage over their mobile payment gateway rivals as both Apple Pay and Android Pay aren’t available in the country yet.
As with their other markets, the most important component of Samsung Pay is the partnerships with local banks. You may have the device and the software version up to date, but if the bank that you do business with doesn’t support the platform, then it’s pretty useless. For this market, they have collaborated with such financial institutions like Axis, HDFC, ICICI, SBI and Standard Chartered (specifically MasterCard and Visa debit and credit cards only).
If you have a Paytm account, you can also connect this to your Samsung Pay account so you don’t have to use two different digital wallets. American Express is still a holdout but hopefully, this will come soon. Citibank cards are also reportedly on the pipeline, but no official announcement yet. So for now, those who have accounts on the aforementioned banks will be the only ones to use the platform in India.
Samsung Pay actually only works with the newer devices like the Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6 edge+. The newly announced Galaxy A5 (2016) and Galaxy A7 (2016) in India also supports the mobile payment gateway.
VIA: SAM Mobile
