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NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Russian telco MegaFon began issuing virtual Mastercard-branded bank cards yesterday, which its users can add to Apple Pay or Samsung Pay mobile wallets.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Alipay is expanding acceptance in another overseas market, Russia, seeking to capture business from Chinese tourists who travel to the country.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight - All stations on Moscow’s new commuter rail line, the Moscow Central Circle, or MCC, and some Moscow Metro stations linked with the new line, accept open-loop payments, including with Apple Pay, the Russian transit authority confirmed to NFC Times, adding that the authority is looking forward to accepting a range of other NFC-enabled wallets, including Samsung Pay.

NFC Times Exclusive – In line with its October promise, Samsung has launched its mobile payments service in two additional markets, Malaysia and Thailand, bringing the number of markets to 12, counting Puerto Rico. Still, in some of the markets where Samsung Pay has launched, the device maker adopted a different rollout strategy, which it calls “early access.”

NFC Times Exclusive Insight –  Las Vegas, USA: Samsung today announced its long-anticipated support for online and in-app payments for Samsung Pay in the U.S., while also releasing plans to launch its payments service in three more countries, though one, Russia, had already been announced.

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 10^th market.

UPDATED: NFC Times Excusive Insight – Samsung Pay is expected to launch in Russia tomorrow, beating Apple to the market, which disclosed earlier this month that it plans a Russian launch of Apple Pay before the end of the year.

NFC Times Exclusive insight – Yandex.Money, sometimes called the “Russian PayPal,” is using host card emulation for its new NFC-enabled payments service, a Yandex.Money representative told NFC Times. PayPal earlier told NFC Times it also plans to use HCE for its app in the U.S.

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 (