Samsung Pay Grows In Popularity

Yesterday, Samsung has announced a new partnership with Sberbank. This means that those of you who own a credit or debit account at this bank will now be able to pay with your phone at NFC or MST readers. But this is just the last bank in a series to offer this service. Here’s the whole list #mobilemagic

Sberbank is the largest bank in Russia and Eastern Europe (owner of all Volksbank assets, except those in Romania) so the partnership certainly offers an easier way to make payments for hundreds of people. “With this partnership, Samsung Pay now covers 65 percent of all private bank accounts in Russia and 80 percent of the country’s urban population.”, said Mr. Arkadiy Graf, Head of Samsung Mobile Russia in an official statement.

But they aren’t the only ones to benefit from mobile payments with a Samsung device. Other banks are offering the same service:

• Alfa Bank JSC
• VTB 24 OJSC
• MTS OJSC
• Raiffeisen Bank JSC
• Russian Standard Bank JSC
• Yandex LLC

If you have a credit or debit card at any of them but prefer to use your mobile, you have to swipe up on your mobile and scan your fingerprint to pay. The company says your payment is secured in three ways: through fingerprint authentication of course, tokenization and by Samsung Knox, Samsung’s defense-grade mobile security platform.

Samsung Pay had crossed 1 million users at the middle of October, with average daily payments done via one Samsung device exceeding 100.000.