Samsung’s mobile payment service was unveiled earlier this year and it went live in the United States and South Korea a few months back. We have known for a while now that over the next few months this service will be expanded to other markets across the globe with China being one of them. We did exclusively report last month that Samsung Pay will be launched in China by Q1 2016 and today it has been confirmed by the company that Samsung Pay will go live in China in “early 2016.”

This has been made possible by cooperation between Samsung and China UnionPay, one of the biggest card issuers in the country, UnionPay card holders will thus be able to manage and use credit as well as debit cards with Samsung Pay as long as they have a supported smartphone. Contactless payments powered by Samsung Pay will be accepted at most of the POS terminals in the country, including Quick Pass-enabled NFC POS terminals. The company will work with China UnionPay to ensure secure transaction with triple-layered protection which includes fingerprint authentication, tokenization and KNOX.

Samsung points out that this technology complies with China’s national mobile payment and financial industry standards, it will soon go through relevant test and certification procedure that’s required by regulators in China before the official rollout to UnionPay cardholders in early 2016. It will have competition though because Apple also announced today that Apple Pay is coming to China early next year as well.

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