Samsung Pay to launch in Australia next week

Samsung will debut its Pay mobile payments service in Australia on June 15, joining rivals Apple Pay and the soon-to-launch Android contactless payments offering in the local market.

Samsung first announced its plan to bring its mobile payments platform to Australia in February this year in partnership with American Express. Citibank is also expected to be unveiled as a launch partner at next week's event.

The contactless payments service is based on mobile wallet technology developed by United States company LoopPay, which Samsung acquired in February last year. It was first trialled in Korea in July 2015 and later expanded to the United States, China, Europe, and Singapore.

Samsung Pay will be available on the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge flagship handsets as well as the Gear S2 Smartwatch.

It will also work on older devices including the Galaxy S6, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+, Note 5, A5 and A7.

The solution uses wireless near-field communications (NFC) to interact with the magentic secure transmission (MST) on point-of-sale machines and replicate the card strip swipes used by older terminals.

Samsung Pay uses three levels of security including fingerprints, tokenisation, and the company's Knox hardware partitioning of devices.

The contactless payments platform will join rival Apple Pay, which landed in Australia last November thanks to a partnership with American Express. In April it became available for ANZ Bank customers.

Australia's banks also signed up to Android Pay late last year ahead of its imminent official arrival.