Samsung Pay coming to Investec, Discovery Bank

Samsung’s tap-and-pay service is coming to more banks. The company said on Monday that Samsung Pay will soon work for Investec and Discovery Bank account holders.

Launched in August 2018 in South Africa, Samsung Pay allows users to tap their supported Samsung smartphones and smartwatches at the point of sale rather than using a traditional card-based solution.

It has generated 400 000 purchase transactions since launch, Samsung said in a statement on Monday.

The service is already available to Absa and Standard Bank account holders, and last week was launched for First National Bank and RMB Private Bank customers.

“Samsung Pay will be available to Investec and Discovery Bank customers shortly, which will make Samsung Pay as ubiquitous as any other means of traditional payment,” Samsung said in the statement.

The company said the platform is secure. Among other security measures, it uses tokenisation from Visa and Mastercard to protect account holders’ physical card information as it is never used during the payment process. Instead, a unique cryptographic sequence is used for the transaction, which changes with every transaction made.

Samsung Pay can be used on the Galaxy S10+, S10, S10e, Galaxy Note9, Note8, S9/S9+, S8/S8+, S7/S7 edge, A8 (2018), A7 (2017) and A5 (2017), Galaxy Watch, Galaxy Watch Active, Gear S3 Watch and Gear Sport Watch.  — (c) 2019 NewsCentral Media