Samsung Pay will reject payments – Kommersant FM

Samsung Pay will stop working with Mir. Cards of this payment system will become unavailable from April 3. The restriction will affect both new and previously opened accounts. This information appeared on the Samsung website. This will affect only Russian citizens, as the company clarified; disabling the service will not affect users in Belarus.

Is there any way to bypass the restrictions? And does this mean that payments by phone will become completely unavailable? Wylsacom blogger Valentin Petukhov says that owners of Android smartphones still have workarounds: “If we are talking about Russian cards, Samsung Pay today is a “Mir” card as such, because others cannot be connected. If we are talking about Western cards, then such cards can be added, just like Apple, in fact, has no problems with this. At the same time, the Samsung Pay service includes not only payment cards, but also all kinds of club, discount, regular customer cards, and so on, they will also work.

Samsung is following exactly the same path as Apple Pay, simply prohibiting the operation of its service with Russian cards in the Russian Federation. You probably won’t be able to get around these restrictions, but to be honest, there’s no particular reason to do so, because Samsung is an Android platform where there are alternatives.

There is RuStore, the ability to install applications bypassing stores altogether. Access to NFC remains, and you can use the same Mir Pay application or an analogue from the bank. If disabling Apple Pay for the Apple ecosystem is a very strong blow at the moment, because there is no alternative, then in the case of the Android system there are no such problems, because there are a huge number of options.”

At the same time, the SBPay, Mir Pay and Hello World applications disappeared from the Google Play store. They were also used for contactless payment. Now the only alternative for Russians is to switch to domestic payment systems, notes Sergei Polovnikov, head of Content Review: “To say that there are some analogues is absolutely wrong, because Samsung Pay is an analogue. That is, the so-called first-level services are Apple Pay and Android Pay. There is also a national payment application in Russia – Mir Pay.

All other applications: Samsung Pay, Huawei Pay, some wallets are secondary services, the influence of which is zero. There was and is no real reason to use these applications. Mir Pay works great in Russia, and no one is going to turn it off.”

Another alternative is payment via SBP using a QR code. According to the Central Bank, in 2023 the number of such transactions increased 27 times. If in 2022 their share was about 5%, then in 2023 every third Russian made a payment using a QR code.

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Elena Tyuleneva