Say hello to Apple Pay, Austria!

Apple Pay is now available in Austria, its 36th market.

As previously hinted at by Erste Bank und Sparkasse, Austria’s largest bank, and confirmed by The Standard newspaper, Austrian customers can now use the mobile payment service to pay for purchases made in stores, apps and on the web using their iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch.

More information is available at apple.com/at/apple-pay.

To get started, customers can add their supported credit or debit card in the Wallet app on their iPhone. Erste-branded MasterCard cards are supported, as is the online bank N26. Additional financial institutions will pick up support for Apple Pay later in the year.

For availability information, check out Apple’s support document.

Apple Pay works with contactless NFC payment terminals and protects your privacy by withholding transaction data from merchants and Apple itself. No credit card or personally identifiable information related to your payments get stored on your device.

Only a payment token is stored securely in the device’s Secure Element, a section of the main processor that’s walled off from the rest of the system. Apple Pay is currently available in about ten European Union markets four years after making its debut in the United States.

Its retail acceptance is now seventy percent in the US and even higher in other markets like Canada, the UK and Australia, where the system has a 99 percent acceptance. By the end of this year, Apple Pay will be available in more than forty countries worldwide.

A support document on Apple’s website provides a handy list of countries and regions where Apple Pay is currently accepted.