Google rolled out Android Pay in Russia where the service is live for all eligible devices as of Tuesday, May 23. The Mountain View-based tech giant revealed that the solution currently supports credit and debit cards issued by 15 banks in the country, including Sberbank, Russian Standard Bank, Tochka, Tinkoff, and Raiffeisen Bank. Not all officially supported financial institutions have the same compatible cards, as e.g. some Visa credit cards won’t work with Android Pay, depending on the bank that issued them. Likewise, Ak Bars Bank is currently the only card issuer whose prepaid cards are compatible with Google’s mobile payment solution and no Visa Electron cards are currently compatible with the service.
System requirements for using Android Pay in Russia are identical to those in other supported countries, meaning all owners of smartphones running Android 4.4 KitKat and later versions of Google’s operating system will be able to use the platform as long as their device of choice is equipped with an NFC adapter. For added convenience, all purchases under 1,000 rubles ($17.64) will automatically wake up the screen of one’s device to facilitate the process of making small transactions at contactless payment terminals. All you need to do to get started with using Android Pay in Russia is download the official Android app of the service from the Google Play Store by following the link beneath this writing.
The inclusion of Russia into Android Pay’s ecosystem comes more than two months after the service last expanded its reach and launched in Belgium, with the Alphabet-owned Internet company promising that the global rollout of the solution will continue shortly. While Android Pay wasn’t the focus of this year’s Google I/O developer conference, the California-based Internet giant still stated that the mobile payments platform will keep growing in the future, both domestically and globally. It remains to be seen how long Google will take to expand the availability of Android Pay within Russia, i.e. include more local banks into its ecosystem, but new details on the company’s efforts to do so and other upcoming improvements and additions to the service should be available later this year.