Samsung’s new Galaxy S5 is being launched in Australia tonight, and there’s one nifty thing we didn’t know about before. If you have a bank account with Westpac, or Commonwealth Bank, you’ve got a brand new reason to upgrade. The Galaxy S5 is the first handset in Australia that lets you shop without having your credit card handy from these two banks.
The Galaxy S5 is Australia’s first phone with Tap ‘N Pay available through both Westpac and Commonwealth Bank, that will let you pay for your petrol or groceries via your phone’s NFC chip. This is the contactless payment tech that started to appear in Australian banks’ credit cards a few years ago – now it’s finally in phones as well.
To use Tap ‘N Pay on the GS5, you’ve got to download the corresponding app for your bank, which takes care of all of the security details for you.
You can register multiple cards with any Galaxy S5, as long as you go through the proper procedures, so you don’t have to be locked in to just one card or bank. As this technology matures, we fully expect other banking providers to jump on board, as well as other mobile phone manufacturers. For now, Samsung has a monopoly.
Of course, in typical Samsung fashion, there’s more. Samsung is teaming up with PayPal for fingerprint-enabled mobile payments, and Samsung Wallet is another money-managing feature that lets you collate vouchers and organise your mobile payments, with fingerprint scanning for identity verification.