The world of mobile payments is going to be rapidly expanding this year, with Google, Apple, and Samsung all introducing their own form of mobile payment systems to make purchasing goods for users that much easier by simply pulling out their smartphones. Samsung Pay is currently only compatible with two devices, the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 Edge, and it’ll be launching first in Samsung’s home region of South Korea as well as the U.S. later on in the year. Soon after though and according to Samsung, they’ll be expanding Samsung Pay out to the China and Europe markets as well.
Samsung Pay works off of both NFC technology as well as the more traditional magnetic stripe technology found in most retail POS checkout systems, so it’s slated to work in a wide range of stores across the globe once it launches in most regions. Both Apple Pay and Android Pay however, will potentially be up and running before Samsung Pay while supporting a rather large set of some 700,000 retail locations at launch with more to come in the future, so Samsung may have some catching up to do, as Samsung’s competition in the mobile payments market should be available in the Summer while Samsung’s Executive VP Rhee Injong states, that they expect Samsung Pay to launch sometime around September alongside Samsung’s next flagship device, speculated to be the follow-up to the Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy Note Edge.
As of now there is no exact time frame for the launch of Samsung Pay in China or Europe, nor for the Australian and South American regions which Injong also stated would be scheduled to see a launch of the service at some point. Chances are though that Samsung will likely have them up and running before the end of the year, and if not they could open up sometime in the beginning of 2016. Samsung Pay was introduced to the world during Mobile World Congress earlier on in March of 2015 and is the culmination of Samsung’s own technology together with LoopPay, the mobile payments company which they purchased last year.