Samsung Pay now available to American Express cardholders

As of October 19th 2017, Samsung Pay is now available to American Express cardholders in the UK. This comes as the second addition to Samsung Pay over the past few months, with support for cards issued by the Co-operative Bank added in September. In addition to American Express and Co-op, Samsung Pay supports Visa and Mastercard as well as cards issued by First direct, HSBC, M&S Bank, MBNA, Nationwide and Santander.

While owners of the new Samsung Galaxy Note 8 (please click here for the full review) or the S8/S8+ can take advantage of iris scanner technology to authorise payments, providing a new level of biometric security. You can also set up a card as a ‘transport card’ to use on TfL services. This option means you don’t even need to wake your phone or verify with a fingerprint, iris scanner or PIN – simply touch the middle section of your phone against the card reader.

It’s rumoured that Samsung is planning to roll out the service to other phones lower down it’s range. This previously might have been problematic, due to the need for a fingerprint or iris scanner to authorise payments, but you can now alternatively use a registered passcode. There are also plans for Samsung Pay Mini app which will work with other Android devices, however the UK release date is yet to be known.