Samsung Pay comes to Westpac customers

Westpac has become the first major bank to offer the Samsung Pay mobile payments solution to its debit and credit card customers.

Samsung Pay went live in Australia with American Express and Citibank customers mid last year. 

Westpac's announcement today means its customers can now use Samsung products - like the Galaxy smartphones and Gear smartwatch - to make payments.

The payments platform uses near-field communications (NFC) to interact with payment terminals equipped with NFC readers. It can also be used with older, standard card readers through Samsung's proprietary magnetic secure transmission (MST) technology, which emulates a traditional card magnetic stripe.

Transactions are authenticated via fingerprint scanning. An encrypted token replaces a user's payment data, while Samsung's Knox enterprise security technology scans the device to protect the payment information.

Samsung will offer authentication by iris scan for the payments platform in its new Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones, alongside PIN and fingerprint authentication.

The company said Samsung Pay has more than 870 bank partnerships worldwide, and processed 240 million transactions in the past 18 months.

Westpac's adoption of Samsung Pay follows the ACCC's knockback of a push by Westpac and three other banks to band together in order to bargain with Apple over its Apple Pay payments platform.

ANZ Bank - not part of the ACCC push - is the only of the big four banks to offer its customers Apple Pay. The service is also available at Macquarie and ING Bank, as well as to American Express customers and Cuscal's 31 financial institution partners.