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BARCELONA, Spain – Samsung Electronics today unveiled its fifth-generation Galaxy S flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S5, which will support NFC, as expected, and also feature a fingerprint sensor in the home button that can secure mobile payments. PayPal has announced it will be the first payments company to support the fingerprint authentication feature on the device.

Google’s vice president of wallet and payments has left the company, following a difficult tenure for the former PayPal executive, who had tried to establish the Google Wallet for physical world payments and offers.

PayPal has an advantage over another big Internet player, Google, in rolling out payments at the physical point of sale because it already has tens of millions of payments customers on file with billions in their accounts “ready to spend,” contends Don Kingsborough, PayPal’s vice president for retail and prepaid products.

Turkish mobile operator Turkcell, one of the first telcos to commercially launch NFC, is introducing a new mobile wallet that includes a PayPal-like service enabling consumers to pay for purchases by entering their phone numbers on point-of-sale terminals.

Google’s new cloud-based wallet will not hurt demand for trusted service management services, contends Gemalto CEO Olivier Piou, who also said he sees little threat to NFC rollouts from such cloud-based mobile-payment services as those planned by Square and PayPal.

Point-of-sale terminal supplier VeriFone is the second major POS terminal vendor to announce a deal to support PayPal’s in-store payment system in its devices.

Google and PayPal have reportedly expressed concerns to European antitrust regulators, saying they fear that if major UK mobile operators are allowed to form their proposed NFC mobile-commerce joint venture, they would have too much power to control secure elements in NFC phones, the Financial Times reported Sunday.

Brazilian online payments company PagSeguro along with Nokia has launched an NFC peer-to-peer payment service enabling users to pay small merchants and transfer money to friends using Nokia smartphones.

Google Wallet co-founding engineer Rob von Behren has left Google for payments startup Square, following former colleague Jonathan Wall in departing the Web giant.

Telefónica group has announced a partnership and investment in U.S.-based online mobile payments company Boku, a move that could further Telefónica’s plans to introduce NFC-based payment in its planned mobile wallets.