State Bank of India said it was enabling payment by Samsung Pay service on some of its higher debit card variants.
Samsung Pay works by mimicking the ‘swiping’ action of a credit or debit card by sending a magnetic pulse. The ‘card machine’ or point of sale machine mistakes this for an actual swipe and processes the transaction.
The technology works on nearly all card swiping machines.
“With this collaboration, ~130 million SBI Debit Cardholders will be able to tap and pay using a wide range of Samsung smartphones at merchant outlets having Card acceptance machines,” SBI said.
Samsung Pay works on 2.5 million Point of Sale (PoS) Card machines across the country.
“The coming together of Samsung – the world’s biggest smartphones company and SBI – India’s biggest bank creates convenience for millions of consumers and provides a major boost to Government of India’s Digital India initiative,” the companies said.
“To help more consumers avail of our innovative payment system, we have also introduced Samsung Pay to our mid-segment smartphones like Galaxy J7 Pro,” said Asim Warsi, Senior Vice President, Mobile Business, Samsung India.
“We recently introduced Samsung Pay Mini to cater to the unique requirements of mid-segment consumers too,” he added.
The payment business is seeing a lot of competition, with banks trying to protect their traditional role and new generation companies like Samsung, Apple, PayTM and Airtel trying to muscle their way in.
Rajnish Kumar, MD, National Banking Group, SBI said SBI is committed towards increasing the share of digital transactions. “The tie-up with Samsung Pay is one such initiative which will give our customers an additional reason to go digital.”
Samsung Pay, launched in India this year, has already received overwhelming response from consumers, the Korean company said.
The technology is available on the newly-launched Samsung Galaxy J7 Pro smartphone, priced at around Rs 20,000.
The J7 Pro comes with a 5.5 inch full HD AMOLED display, 13MP + 13MP camera configurations and a metal unibody design.
With this, it has become the most affordable smartphone in Samsung’s smartphone range with Samsung Pay functionality.
Galaxy J series is India’s most popular smartphone series, accounting for one in four smartphones sold in the country.
Other handsets supporting the payment mechanism include the Galaxy S8 and 8+, Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6 edge+, Galaxy A5 (2016 and 2017), Galaxy A7 (2016 and 2017) and Galaxy A9 Pro.
SBI debit card holders will also get up to Rs 500 cash back for transactions done using the new method this month.
Apart from cards, Samsung Pay users can also make fast and secure UPI payments through P2P money transfers and also QR code scan and online payments wherever UPI payments are accepted.
Consumers can add their SBI accounts and accounts of all banks which are on UPI to Samsung Pay.
Samsung Pay also supports wallet payments – Paytm on Samsung Pay and Mobikwik and Paytm on Samsung Pay Mini, which is designed to cater to the unique requirements of Indian mid-segment consumers.
Samsung’s MST replicates a card swipe by wirelessly transmitting magnetic waves from the supported Samsung device to a standard card reader.
Through MST, Samsung Pay will work seamlessly on a majority of PoS terminals in India.