Canadians will soon be scanning their fingerprints – and eventually their irises – for Samsung Pay transactions, reports AndroidCentral.
To be clear, it hasn’t been officially announced by Samsung. The news came via a Twitter user who asked Samsung when the service would launch in Canada, and took a screenshot of a reply indicating that it will launch in the country “from the first week of November, 2016”. The reply also said that CIBC would be the first bank to support the platform, through its Visa cards.
It’s a rather late arrival in comparison to Samsung Pay’s rival Apple Pay, which debuted in Canada almost a year ago. The latter benefitted from the country’s preponderance of NFC readers at POS terminals, which are required for Apple Pay to function but not for Samsung Pay. AndroidCentral’s Daniel Bader speculates that Samsung may have seen the country as a lower priority market since the MST technology that lets it work with older card readers would be of little added benefit to consumers.
Of course, in the near future the appeal of iris scanning could draw new users. While Apple Pay and Samsung Pay both use fingerprint authentication for transactions, Samsung is likely to enable iris scan authentication for mPayments when it launches its anticipated Galaxy S8 smartphone; this functionality was already in place via the Samsung Note7 before it was effectively canceled.
If Samsung Pay does indeed launch in Canada next week, that will be the 13th country in which it’s operational.
Source: AndroidCentral
(Originally posted on FindBiometrics)
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