Customers of Russian Standard Bank can download a prepaid MasterCard PayPass application onto the embedded chips of two Samsung NFC models, then tap to pay for purchases of less than 1,000 rubles (
The project was delayed, at least in part because of implementation issues. It’s the first in Europe under a partnership agreement between MasterCard and Samsung Electronics to use the latter’s embedded chips for NFC payments supporting MasterCard PayPass. But like the parties in an earlier agreement between Visa and Samsung, MasterCard and Samsung have managed to introduce few services using embedded chips–just two in Australia. MasterCard had planned to launch two other European projects, in Ukraine and Turkey, but these appear to have been shelved. Russia’s largest bank, state-controlled Sberbank, has said it plans to launch its earlier planned embedded chip project, likely with MasterCard for NFC payments, along with one using host-card emulation. Still, the major payment schemes, especially Visa, appear to have turned their attention to host-card emulation, or HCE, as an alternative to secure elements to reduce cost and complexity of introducing NFC payments. Moreover, Samsung seems to have backed off of its embedded-chip strategy because of resistance from telcos, growing interest in HCE and some supply problems that caused most of the its Galaxy S5 units to ship without an embedded chip.
* Trusted Service Manager: Defined loosely to include companies or other organizations securely distributing, provisioning and managing applications, generally over the air, on secure elements in NFC mobile phones; or licensing their platforms for this purpose.N/A: Not available or not applicable.
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