Mastercard has announced that it will be helping Samsung bring Samsung Pay to Europe.
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Although the partnership for European expansion was announced yesterday, Samsung Pay is expected to roll out officially in South Korea and to go live in the US before its European debut. TechCrunch has contacted the company for more information.
While you have been considering a switch to Apple given how Apple Pay has stormed the market and made those little transactions so easy, we suggest you rest assured that Samsung Pay will soon ease your woes.
It’s a good step forward as Samsung prepares for the global rollout of its mPayment platform, which will compete against the firmly entrenched Apple Pay.
As for Mastercard users, they’ll be able to activate Samsung Pay by connecting to the MasterCard Digital Enablement Service (MDES).
Samsung has struck a deal with MasterCard to connect European card issuers to the handset manufacturer’s forthcoming mobile payments service.
However, Samsung Pay also supports Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST), so it can be used with magnetic strip terminals as well.
The company said last month that it planned to rollout Samsung Pay to Europe. Tokenisation services for app, eCommerce, and recurring billing card-on-file programmes will be available to US and Canadian merchants later this year and expand globally across all MDES-enabled markets, as reported by MasterCard.
Samsung, for its part, said that it was “pleased to join forces with MasterCard to offer a simple and safe mobile payment experience enabled for wider merchant acceptance to MasterCard cardholders and issuers in Europe”. “Both organisations are committed to ground breaking fintech innovations that will deliver on the promise of a true mobile wallet”.
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Since the announcement of MDES in 2013, millions of MasterCard accounts have been tokenised for use in popular digital wallet services. MDES now provides tokenization services for credit, debit, prepaid and small business cards.
