Samsung Pay officially rolls out for Indian customers

Samsung has officially launched its mobile payments platform, Samsung Pay, in India. There were reports of the company planning to bring the service early this year and it seems that Samsung has been committed to it.Samsung had opened early access registrations on the Samsung Pay website and it seems that users are now getting access to the service. Since it is still at an early stage, it is available with limited banks including Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, SBI, and Standard Chartered including credit and debit cards of the mentioned banks.  Samsung will be adding support for more banks including Citibank and American Express in the coming weeks and is also offering payments via Paytm wallet.Samsung Pay in India supports Magnetic Secure Transmission where a user can send a magnetic signal from his/her compatible smartphone to payment terminal card reader. There is support for NFC as well, but there are hardly any places in India that offer NFC payment solutions.According to Samsung, the list of devices that will support Samsung Pay include Samsung Galaxy Note 5, Samsung Galaxy S7, Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+, Samsung Galaxy A7 (2016), and Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016). The newly launched Galaxy A5 (2017) and the Galaxy A7 (2017) will also be supported.With this launch, Samsung has managed to become the first company to bring such a mobile based payments system to India beating the likes of Apple Pay and Android Pay.