Biometric Payments Come to South Africa via Samsung Pay

Samsung Pay has now reached South Africa, the company has announced.

Samsung’s mobile payments platform arrives in the country with the support of domestic banks Absa and Standard Bank, as well as Visa and Mastercard. Other partners for the launch include Virgin Money, British Airways, and the Avios airfare rewards program.

In a post on its new Samsung Pay South Africa website, the company emphasized the security of its payments platform, which can use iris scanning, fingerprint recognition, or PINs to authenticate individual transactions. “With Samsung Pay, every transaction uses an encrypted digital token for added security, so your actual card number is never used during a transaction,” the company noted.

The South Africa launch coincides with the third anniversary of Samsung Pay, which is now available in 24 markets across six continents. In a separate statement acknowledging the anniversary, Samsung noted that its platform had “recently passed more than 1.3 billion transactions globally.”

While Samsung Pay’s growth may be impressive, without hard numbers concerning users and revenues, analysts have tended to speculate that Apple’s mobile payments platform is leading the charge in the relatively new market of mobile payments. Nevertheless, growth is widely expected for both players as an increasing number of consumers opt to use their phones to make purchases.

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(Originally posted on Mobile ID World)