MasterCard announced an agreement for Samsung to use the MasterCard Digital Enablement Service to deliver Samsung Pay in Europe. Samsung announced in March plans to launch its own mobile payments service. The initial launch is planned for the US and Korea later this summer, followed by Europe and China. The service will enable consumers to use their Samsung smartphones to pay for purchases at contactless and magnetic stripe terminals using NFC and MST technologies.
The agreement with Mastercard is expected to accelerate the introduction of the service in Europe. European card issuers will be able to connect to the MDES platform and activate the Samsung Pay service upon launch. Cardholders can then activate their credit, debit, reloadable prepaid and small business cards from participating issuers in the Samsung Pay service in order to use their mobile devices to make purchases. MDES provides tokenization services for payment cards and already has a similar agreement with Samsung in the US.
