As a result of the security evaluations undertaken by the Thales teams in Toulouse (France), the newly unveiled Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ enables secure payment networks from all major credit cards such as Mastercard and Visa.

The Samsung Pay HCE enabled banking app lets users save their bank and credit card details on their smartphones. Users can then use the NFC-based and MST-based contactless system to make payments at the point of sale. This payment method is currently being rolled out worldwide for Samsung users and is supported by more than a thousand banks and credit unions worldwide.

Underpinning the evaluation process was a relationship of trust established by Thales, Mastercard and Visa over the course of more than a decade. Thales operates one of the first laboratories accredited by Visa in 2014 to conduct security evaluations on HCE-based banking applications. From 2015, the Thales cyber security laboratory in Toulouse was accredited by Mastercard and other payment networks.

Thales has long partnered with Samsung, to deliver cryptographic security at critical points of the manufacturing process for mobile phones and other smart devices.

The development of Thales’s expertise in the security of contactless payments is a logical step beyond the Group’s leadership in cyber security for the banking sector. Today, Thales contributes to the protection of 80% of worldwide payment transactions and ensures data security for 19 of the 20 largest banks in the world.