Point-of-Sale network provider Mswipe on Tuesday announced that it has enabled Samsung Pay on all its terminals across India to enable contactless digital payments via the South Korean tech giant’s mobile payment platform. Mswipe claims to have over 200,000 terminals in the country, so Samsung Pay customers will now be able to make payments at all those merchants by just tapping their Samsung handset on an Mswipe terminal after choosing their credit or debit card and, scanning their fingerprint to confirm their identity. According to Mswipe CEO Mr. Manish Patel, the company’s PoS terminals have all had NFC enabled on them for some time now, as the company has long anticipated a shift towards contactless digital payments by the end of this decade.
Samsung launched its mobile payment platform, Samsung Pay, earlier this year in India, after having originally launched it in South Korea back in August 2015. Since then, the company has launched the service in many other regions around the world, including, but not limited to China, Russia, Brazil and the U.S. The company is also expected to launch the service in the U.K. later this month, while many other countries, like Turkey, Poland, Indonesia, Italy and Mexico are expected to get it at some stage going forward. It is important to note here that unlike Android Pay which works on pretty much all Android devices with an NFC chip, Samsung Pay works exclusively on the company’s own smartphones, like the recently-launched Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus.
While India has been relatively late to hop on to the NFC bandwagon, things seem to be changing recently as many of the country’s largest banks and payment gateways have started issuing NFC-enabled cards that are capable of contactless transactions. Last Year, Visa said it had issued over a million such cards to users around the country. The company also claims to have over 100,000 merchant locations that are capable of processing NFC transactions. Some of the largest banks in India are also doing their bit to support NFC-based payment platforms in the country. Last year, the nation’s largest bank, SBI, claimed to have enabled NFC-based transactions at over 300,000 locations across the country, while HDFC Bank’s NFC-enabled PoS terminals stood at over 280,000.