Xiaomi’s CEO, Lei Jun, announced the company’s NFC based mobile payment at an event last night. The mobile payment service called MI Pay joins other NFC payments such as Google’s own Android Pay, Samsung Pay, and Apple Pay.

NFC payments allows you to store card details (credit, debit, gift, loyalty, and membership cards) on your phone which you can use to pay for items or get access to places without having the physical card with you. MI pay works the same way. All you have to do is to place your NFC enabled phone (after launching the payment app) against the card reader and you’re ready to go.

Xiaomi already has a NFC-enabled phone, the Xiaomi Mi 5. So owners of this phone should soon get the service rolled out to them. The company has announced a number of banks that currently support MI Pay: China Construction Bank, Bank of Communications, China Merchants Bank, Huaxia Bank, Minsheng Bank, Ping An Bank, and Industrial Bank. They’ve also announced that more banks (Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank, China Everbright Bank, Beijing Bank, and Guangdong Development Bank) will be added in September.

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Following this announcement, Xiaomi’s upcoming flagship devices such as the Mi Note 2 should come with NFC so as to get more people to use MI Pay.

The post Xiaomi’s CEO Announces NFC Mobile Payment MI Pay appeared first on Gizmochina.

For the past few weeks, we have heard a lot about the upcoming Xiaomi Mi 5. Right from the specifications, design to the release, we have a solid idea about what to expect from Xiaomi’s long awaited flagship smartphone.

According to the latest information, the Xiaomi Mi 5 will support NFC (Near Field Communication) feature. There is often a debate about the usefulness of the NFC, some against it, saying it’s not a required feature while others for it, saying that they use it almost every day. Nevertheless, Xiaomi decided to remove the NFC feature on its Xiaomi Mi 4 flagship. While explaining the reason for this decision, CEO Lei Jun revealed that only 1% of the Mi3 and Mi2A customers actually made use of it.

Now, it looks like the company has decided that NFC is useful again. We got to know that the Mi 5 will feature NFC chip thanks to a document released by China UnionPay, also known as CUP which is China’s only domestic card organization. The organization recently released a new NFC-enabled payment system, “Cloud Lightening Pay” (translated) which enables the customers to make payments via their smartphones. The technology works similar to other mobile payment systems we have seen in international markets, and relies on the phone’s NFC chip.

In the document released by the organization, among the first 32 smartphones that support this payment system, Xiaomi Mi 5 made it to the list. This is only possible if the phone supports NFC payments, which means we are almost sure that the Mi 5 flagship will come with NFC chip on board.

I am sure many Xiaomi fans will be excited to hear that the Mi 5 has this feature. It definitely helps those users who rely on mobile payments and other NFC-enabled features.

As for other features of the Xiaomi Mi 5 like the fingerprint sensor, you can read more about it from here.

The post Xiaomi Mi 5 Will Feature NFC According To New Document appeared first on Gizmochina.