Exclusive NFC Times Insight – Less than a week after Samsung switched on its mobile payments service in Russia, Apple has launched Apple Pay in the country, continuing the international expansion of its NFC payments service to a 10th market.
Apple had announced the plans to expand to Russia last month. The new service, however, launched only with one bank–albeit Russia’s largest by assets, Sberbank–and one payments network, Mastercard.
Sberbank, which had earlier planned then failed to launch its own NFC payments services on embedded chips and with host card emulation, was not among the banks participating in Samsung Pay, which launched last week.