Samsung Pay Launches In The UK; Watch Out Apple Pay And Android Pay

Samsung Pay has gone live in the UK, ready to offer an alternative to Android Pay and challenge Apple Pay.

Users of Samsung’s Galaxy S6, S7 and the latest Galaxy S8 smartphones will be able to use the contactless  service, providing they have a Visa or Mastercard payment card, provided by the likes of Santander, Nationwide and MBNA.

Other banks, such as HSBC, First Direct and AmericanExpress will be adding their support for Samsung Pay in due course.

Samsung Pay UK

Alongside offering contactless smartphone payments secured by a fingerprint scanner or PIN number, users of Samsung’s more modern Galaxy handsets can authenticate payments through use of the iris scanner supported by the smartphones.

For security purposes, Samsung Pay generates a digital token that is associated with a user’s smartphone and stored on a secure server to bypass the need to effectively broadcast card numbers to a vendor’s card reader and to ensure that the number is only associated with the cardholder’s chosen device rather than multiple handsets.

MasterCard provides the tokenisation service through its  Mastercard Digital Enablement Service (MDES), which works across 13 European countries.

“We are thrilled to see Samsung Pay land in the UK, and we are enjoying working alongside them our partner banks on behalf of our cardholders. Every Samsung Pay transaction made with Mastercard is highly secure – a critical part of this is our ability to tokenise cardholder details,” said Mark Barnett, president at Mastercard UK & Ireland.

To standout from Apple Pay and Android Pay, Samsung’s smartphone payments service can be used without turning on the phone’s display or for a particular card to be selected when making contactless payments on Transport for London (TfL) services, thereby cutting down on any potential to add to queues during rush hour on the London Underground.

With Samsung Pay now in the UK, smartphone users now have a third option to make contactless payment with their mobiles, and thus the adoption of such payment services is only likely to increase.

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