Thank you for your answer :)

Do you think Samsung will make it available for kiwis by any chance ?

So basically there is a feature but it is not available for some reason :(

With banks launching their own payments systems here there is very little need for products such as Samsung Pay. I suspect they'll really struggle to gain any market share in Australia where pretty much every big (and even some of the small) banks have HCE solutions in a market which is the most developed for contactless credit card payments in the world.

Personally I think that this pay system needs to be as transparent as eftpos.  All these closed wall payment systems is not good for roll out to business. 

The whole mobile payment ecosystem in NZ is highly fragmented. While I'm happy to experiment with the bespoke solutions available, I'm not overly worried about continuing to use my physical MC via Paywave. I guess I can always tape it to the back of my phone if need be.

wsnz:

 

The whole mobile payment ecosystem in NZ is highly fragmented. While I'm happy to experiment with the bespoke solutions available, I'm not overly worried about continuing to use my physical MC via Paywave. I guess I can always tape it to the back of my phone if need be.

 

I would disagree with that. IMHO NZ isn't fragmented - we're one of the few places that doesn't have fragmentation.

We've got HCE now from several banks that are as close to an open standard as you can get with support across a huge number of Android devices, and we have Semble using UICC / SWP based SE that's available on every network and every phone with the SIM alliance API, which one again is really as close to a standards based solution as you can get for a SWP solution. No other country has had every mobile carrier partner to launch a solution, they normally have fragmented offerings that are only available on a single network.

My issue isn't with the underlying technology used; I completely agree with your point about that being highly standardised and ubiquitous across all carriers, unlike most other nations.

The problem I have is with the proliferation of proprietary apps required with each bank, financial institution and third party. This means if I have multiple cards, I need a multiple apps all with different permissions (some of which are very questionable) and all of which need to remain updated for security purposes.

Loyalty cards can't be added to most banking apps, so there's another series of apps I need to install and manage. Third parties such as Semble, only provide services from two banks, but have the capability to add additional loyalty cards and transport cards, but it remains to be seen whether additional banks, loyalty companies such as Flybuys, AA, etc. and regional transport authorities such as AT (unlikely) embrace Semble or continue to use their own apps.

IMO it’s unlikely that Google, Samsung, Apple and Microsoft will gain traction for the payment/loyalty card systems in NZ for quite some time, so we may remain in this fractured state for the foreseeable future.

I can fully understand why the average non tech-savvy consumer would just continue to use plastic.