CommBank offers PayPass payments on Galaxy S4

The Commonwealth Bank has followed quickly on the heels of competitor Westpac to announce wave-and-go payment capabilities with MasterCard’s PayPass on a Samsung smartphone.

CommBank's pay tag

Westpac yesterday announced its customers would be able to use their Samsung Galaxy S or Galaxy Note 3 smartphones to make payments in store, via Visa’s payWave technology, from early next year.

CommBank today said customers will immediately be able to use the near-field communications (NFC) capabilities baked into the Samsung Galaxy S4 coupled with MasterCard’s PayPass to make tap-and-go payments.

Owners of the i9505 and i9507 variants of the Galaxy S4 will be able to use the capability today. i9506 users will need to update their phone software to be able to use the payment solution - which they can do from early next year, the bank said.

The solution, first flagged in October, can be used at 220,000 PayPass contactless terminals in 99,000 merchant locations across Australia, the bank said.

The payments will be processed using CommBank’s new mobile application, available for download today, which has been developed specifically for Android and Windows 8 mobile platforms.

The application for iOS devices won’t be available until the end of January. 

The mobile app also integrates CommBank’s new pay tag sticker payment solution, first announced in October.

The pay tags are available for iOS and Android smartphones at a cost of $2.99. It attaches to the back of the smartphone and interacts with the mobile application to process payments up to $100 in value.