Xiaomi have announced plans to launch their own mobile payment system. Xiaomi, the chart toppers in China, will roll out the payment infrastructure in their home market.
According to sources, Xiaomi will parter with China’s bank card association, China UnionPay for this.
The payment system will be similar to Samsung’s take on mobile payment. Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun reveals that the payment system (‘Xiaomi Pay’? ‘MiPay’?) will use NFC to accomplish payments.
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Domestic biggies including AliBaba and Tencent — with Alipay and services such as WeChat — are gears in the clockwork of China’s mobile payments. Given Xiaomi’s generation rate into the market, their payment service is expected to make mainstream such transfers.
On another note, are mobile payments finally something that could put NFC to use? THere’s forever been a debate about the usefulness of the feature.
Haha, wouldn’t that require them to put NFC in their devices..?
*And for anyone that wants to come along and say “The Mi5 does have NFC” etc, the majority of their recent devices don’t ok…
The majority of their devices were released at a time when NFC was virtually useless in China, Xiaomi’s home market. Even this system won’t be rolled out for quite some time. Apple didn’t add NFC until Apple Pay was announced with the 6. Now all future Apple devices will include it, just like with Xiaomi.
That justification sort of applies to Xiaomi because their devices are so cheap, but I’d never buy that cr@p from Apple… They’ve always set such big prices that they’ve always been able to afford to throw in NFC for the couple of cents it would cost them…
Question should be asked though, when Xiaomi were developing the Mi4 for example why didn’t they have any forward planning to stick a mega cheap NFC chip in there also?
Same question was asked to OnePlus regarding the OP2…
OP2 is a little different, that is a phone which has a heavy presence in both Europe and the United States, two places where NFC is used extensively. Xiaomi is exclusively an Asia brand where NFC is non existent. There was no point putting a chip in the Mi4 they knew at the time no one would be able to use it.
That would be reason enough for them to introduce all new models with NFC and a chance to generate sales hoping people would upgrade from existing phones.