Samsung Pay South Africa

Samsung Pay will be expanding to include the likes of Investec and Discovery Bank soon, according to the company. It was only last week that FNB and RMB came on-board, which is in addition to launch partner Standard Bank and Absa, supported by Visa and Mastercard.

I got off a flight a week ago and saw the FNB announcement, and of course, enrolled my cards immediately on my way out of the airport. I’ve been following the Samsung Pay announcements closely and I was always *that* journalist who kept asking Samsung when it was being rolled out in SA and with FNB support.

Last year when it came out, I opened up a R5/pm transactional account with Absa just to test it! You can read my article here: https://techcentral.co.za/i-tried-samsung-pay-and-this-is-what-happened/82854/

Since it was launched last year, Samsung says it has generated over 400 000 purchase transactions. It’s good to see how its growing, and hopefully more people will sign up as it has a 97% acceptance rate with SA till points (source: Samsung). I love digital payment methods and I’ll sign up for any and every option available to me.

Samsung Pay works on selected Galaxy devices and on the wearables side, it supports the Galaxy Gear and Galaxy Watch. It uses a secure tokenisation system that generates a unique number for each transaction, which means your physical card information is always protected. What more reason is there than to switch over?

Anyway, here’s a list of supported devices, as of 11 March 2019: Galaxy S10+, S10, S10e, Galaxy Note 9, Note 8, 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.