Oberthur Will Power Samsung Pay’s European Debut

As Samsung Wallet closes shop, the mobile company announces it chose Oberthur Technologies (OT) to deploy Samsung Pay in Europe later this year.

Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, which launched in Europe in April, are equipped with the vendor’s NFC-embedded secure element, enabling owners to use their smartphone for contactless payments.

Mobile wallets have had extremely low acceptance with merchants: only 5 to 10 percent of the merchants in the U.S. accept contactless payments. But almost all of them can accept magnetic strip cards. This means that merchants won’t have to invest in new NFC infrastructure to accept contactless payment from Samsung Pay. Samsung works with Near Field Communication (NFC) and Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) – enabling wireless payment information to reach either a contactless or traditional magnetic stripe merchant terminal. In fact, in March of this year Samsung Pay confirmed that allowing consumers to make secure mobile payments at nearly all merchant locations was their objective.

“We are very proud to have been the first selected by Samsung for the launch of Samsung Pay in Europe and to bring this new service to the many banks who will partner with us in Europe,” said Marek Juda, Managing Director of the Solutions Business Unit at OT.

“Since the early stage of the Samsung Pay service definition, OT has been a key partner to us, both for their innovative mindset and technological expertise and for their strong banking customer footprint,” said Dr. Injong Rhee, Executive Vice President of Mobile Commerce at Samsung Electronics.

Contracting with Samsung and OT, banks will be able to offer their NFC payment card in the Samsung Pay application. Samsung and OT will manage the enrolment, provisioning and lifecycle processes for the banks.

To sign up for Samsung Pay, all the user will need to do is take a picture of his/her current payment card (or enter its data) and accept the terms and conditions of the service. Once the user has been properly authenticated by his/her bank, OT will provision the NFC payment card over-the-air in the eSE and it will automatically be available from the Samsung Pay application.

Last year in February, Samsung bought LoopPay in an effort to become the Apple Pay of the Android ecosystem – and to compete with Apple more generally. LoopPay, a mobile commerce platform that uses its Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) patented technology to turn existing mag stripe readers into mobile contactless receivers of Samsung Pay, is due to launch in the U.S. and Korea this summer, followed by Europe and China thereafter.