With Samsung Pay now up and running in India, Samsung is keen to further promote the service with the newly added support of American Express.
The credit card issuer joins Mastercard, Visa, Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, SBI Cards and Standard Chartered in supporting Samsung’s mobile payment platform in the country.
Samsung has also revealed that it has integrated the government’s Unified Payments Interface into the app, which could help to further bolster its strength in the market. The UPI is designed to facilitate transactions between bank accounts on mobile devices, and can even do so on the basis of an individual’s Aadhaar number – citizens’ biometric national ID accounts – though at this time Samsung Pay doesn’t appear to have any links to Aadhaar. That’s the front on which Samsung Pay could face its toughest challenge, with Aadhaar Pay, a government-backed mobile payments platform, also having recently launched in the country.
In a new statement officially announcing the Indian launch of Samsung Pay, the company emphasized its security, highlighting “fingerprint authentication, card tokenization and Samsung’s defense-grade mobile security platform Samsung KNOX.” That marketing strategy may play upon recent concerns about the security of Aadhaar in the minds of consumers, but Samsung has also tended to mention the security of Samsung Pay when launching it in other markets, too.
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