Sanjay with his mother: Do What You Can’t

“She was not comfortable using the smartphone–as it involves touches on the screen. And she never understood why the rest of the family were, at times, hooked on to their devices,” says Sanjay. But over the last few days, Sanjay’s mom has turned into a smartphone fan. She is doing video calls with Sanjay’s siblings who aren’t able to meet her. She is video calling her sister in Jammu, whose son is stuck (as a crew member) on the Grand Princess cruise ship on the coast of San Francisco. And she has been witnessing how Sanjay is paying her doctor’s fee, and other bills, through his smartphone.

“We all understand the predicament of our seniors. But once that barrier is overcome, they know how helpful the smartphone can be. During the lockdown, most of us must have felt the same way,” he adds.

Sanjay now expects people to use their smartphone services more meaningfully. As they delve deeper into the digital world, they need more trusted and secured devices. Like Samsung phones, which are protected by defense-grade KNOX security.

The smartphone’s utility will also rise from a hygiene point of view–the lesser the touch, the better. For instance, consumers will use Samsung Pay to make contactless payments on card machines (instead of handing out the credit or debit card). Galaxy users can also use it to make payments through wallets and UPI, with a swipe of the finger on their personal device.

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Sanjay, who spent his initial years in Samsung at SRI-Bengaluru, Samsung’s biggest research centre outside Korea, before moving to the Two Horizon Center head-office in Gurugram, played a leading role in localising and launching Samsung Pay, the only contactless phone payment service in India that can be used on both, Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) and Near Field Communication (NFC) technology-enabled card machines.

Samsung Pay is the first smartphone-based UPI Payment application launched in India. It also integrated several digital wallets, and recently added the national toll payment app FASTag into it, making it a ‘super payment app’ for all consumers.

‘We will delve deeper into the Digital World’

The team recently enabled Samsung Pay for consumers to pay directly to the PM CARES Fund via the app.

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“You really don’t need to worry if you forget your wallet and cash back home. If you have your phone with Samsung Pay on it, you can make credit and debit card payments, and even UPI or wallet payments using your smartphone, and without having to touch any other object,” Sanjay explains.

“And now that my mom is comfortable using the smartphone, I really want her to experience Samsung Pay some day. It is a sheer joy to see how people react when they make a payment by just tapping their phone on the card machine. It’s like some magic.”

A significant achievement of the digital services team in India that Sanjay leads was to localise the Galaxy Store, loading it with top local content, games as well as themes. The ‘Make for India’ Galaxy Store is now available in 14 regional languages giving local app and content developers better discovery and reach.

The team also repositioned the ‘My Galaxy’ app as a unique platform for curated content—videos, music and games—for Indian consumers. They recently added a K-Pop section that has been a run-away hit among millennials. ‘My Galaxy’ has seen significant uptick in content consumption at a time when a large number of people in India are working remotely from home.

What’s his take on work from home? Sanjay quips he has an added role now! At home, he gets to decide how his family members use data, and when. “It is challenging and fun in equal measures. I have back-to-back video conferences, my wife works from home and our kids attend online classes. A typical weekday starts with identifying how to ensure Wi-Fi connectivity for all. I have to ensure that no data is diverted for entertainment during office hours, even if that means changing Wi-Fi password at times,” says Sanjay, with the effervescent smile on his face.

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Samsung Pay, Samsung Electronics’ digital payments platform, is fast gaining acceptance as a revolutionary payments system since its launch on March 22 in India. The mobile payments service is already being used by hundreds of thousands of consumers in India.

In fact, Samsung Pay has seen nearly 50% adoption in Samsung’s recently-launched flagships Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+.

The introduction of Samsung Pay in just-launched Galaxy J7 Pro smartphone and Samsung Pay Mini in Galaxy J7 Max smartphone is expected to boost the reach of Samsung Pay in the country. Samsung Pay Mini, designed to cater to the unique requirements of Indian mid-segment consumers, provides a comprehensive platform for government’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) as well as e-wallets.

Samsung Pay Mini caters to the unique requirements of Indian mid-segment consumers

Samsung Pay is not only winning the hearts of consumers in India, but is also being recognized by the Payments Industry.

Earlier this month, Samsung Pay snapped up three awards — ‘Best Contactless Innovation of the year’, ‘Best Mobile Payments Solution of the year’, and ‘Best Payments Innovation of the year’ – at the Payments and Cards Awards held on June 7 in Mumbai.

Payments & Cards Summit is a comprehensive platform providing a unique venue point to discuss the current situation, future trends and innovations in payments, cards and mobile markets. The Summit is about who innovates first, market share and making a profit in this competitive industry.

The launch of Samsung Pay in India was the culmination of many months of collaborative work among Samsung’s R&D, product and marketing teams.

Sanjay Razdan, Director, Samsung India Electronics Ltd.

“Samsung Pay background work started as early as November 2015 when Samsung India decided that we need a key differentiation for our consumers,” said Mr. Sanjay Razdan, Director, Samsung India Electronics Ltd.

Nearly two years ago, when the India team started work on Samsung Pay, they had not realized that it will be such a massive challenge to bring Samsung Pay to India. The sheer scale of the project made the task daunting. The team was not only tasked with bringing India’s big banks on one platform, but it also had to ensure the participation of network companies – Visa, MasterCard and Amex – to make Samsung Pay a success in India.

Samsung Pay team engrossed in discussion ahead of the launch

The Samsung Pay team in India simultaneously worked with retail PoS (Point of Sale) solutions providers such as Pine Labs, Ezetap and Mswipe to ensure that their machines would accept payments made through Samsung Pay. It also worked closely with India’s central bank RBI, which is the regulator for banking system.

Even as all this was happening, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Demonetization of high-value currency notes in a dramatic move on November 8, 2016. Demonetization accelerated India’s transition towards a digital economy and Team Samsung thought it was a great opportunity to make a mark with Samsung Pay.

In most western countries, where Samsung Pay had been launched, credit cards were the dominant mode of digital payment. But India, with just 23 million credit card users, was very different.

Manasvi Vedhera, DGM, Samsung India Electronics Ltd.

“We came up with a debit card strategy for India as there are around 600 million plus debit card users. But we wanted to make our product even more interesting, so we started working on localization at a very early stage. Paytm and UPI were the two use cases that we started work on to ensure we have better use cases so that less credit cards is not seen as a disadvantage,” said Mr. Manasvi Vedhera, DGM, Samsung India Electronics Ltd.

Localization, part of Samsung’s ‘Make for India’ strategy, saw the integration of Samsung Pay with digital wallets such as Paytm and government-backed Unified Payments Interface or UPI. The addition of these local payments solutions is a big reason for the rising appeal of Samsung Pay in India.

“Paytm and UPI development were big challenges as these were new integrations and the teams were not aware of the complexity. At times it was a round the clock team work between R&D, business and partners to ensure that there is no slip up on the schedule etc.,” said Mr. Sanjay Razdan.

One of the biggest compliments for Samsung Pay came from Mr. Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog, or the National Institution for Transforming India, earlier this year.

Mr. HC Hong, President and CEO, Samsung Southwest Asia with Mr. Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog

Mr. Kant, a key driver of the Government’s ‘Make in India’ policy, said, “This is a unique innovation. I think it will simplify matters. It will help India technologically leapfrog and take India towards digital economy, which is what PM Modi’s dream all about.”