Samsung Pay is now available in Italy, the sixth country in Europe to receive the service and its 21st market worldwide.

The company said the platform is the world’s most accepted mobile payment service with more than 1,700 partnerships in place, including deals with mainstream payment processors, point of sale companies and retailers.

It added the success was partly down to being able to perform both NFC and MST payments, widening the number of terminals able to accept the system. Many rival platforms can only use NFC or QR codes to process physical retail payments.

Samsung Pay is already available in Spain, UK, Russia, Belarus and Switzerland.

Italy opportunity
In a statement to Italian press, Samsung said there had been a sharp increase in digital payments in Italy during 2017, when 70 million point of sale transactions were processed. It estimates the value of annual mobile payment transactions in the country could reach €6.5 billion in the year 2020.

Samsung Italy president Carlo Barlocco said: “We are convinced that the launch of Samsung Pay in Italy will contribute to the transformation of the relationship between Italians and money in the direction of the cashless society that has been discussed for some time.”