Huawei Pay Launches In Russia With Union Pay

China’s UnionPay and Huawei are teaming up to bring Huawei Pay to Russia.

According to PocketNow, the companies’ partnership will bring the mobile payment platform first to Russia, followed by other “belt and road” economic regions, which is most of Eurasia.

UnionPay bank cards are currently accepted at 85 percent of Point of Sale (POS) terminals and ATMs throughout Russia, and there have been about 1.3 million UnionPay bank cards issued by Russian banks.

“Yesterday Huawei signed a mutual cooperation agreement with UnionPay International with the aim of working together to promote the globalization of Huawei Pay and to accelerate its roll-out worldwide in order to provide a better mobile payment experience for Huawei mobile device users,” according to a statement on Huawei’s website. “The agreement marks the first joint effort between Huawei and UnionPay to bring Huawei Pay to the global market since the two enterprises worked together to create Huawei Pay back in 2016.”

Huawei Pay is linked to the company’s smartphones and other wearable devices. The Huawei Mate S was the first Huawei device to support the new payment capabilities.

As China’s first security chip-based mobile payment service, devices must come with a security chip, NFC, fingerprint sensor and also the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which secures the confidential data.

Huawei Pay now supports cards from 66 financial institutions and is on 20 smartphones and smartwatches. In 2017, it was used to perform CNY4 billion ($632 million) worth of transactions.

“Today, more and more people are using mobile payment services such as Huawei Pay in their daily life,” the statement continued. “With the constant increase in the quantity of Huawei and Honor mobile phones and smart watches sold all over the world and the expansion of Huawei Pay to international markets, the number of annual Huawei Pay transactions is bound to increase further.”