Mobile payments are just taking off as some major companies are bringing their systems to their devices. Apple Pay, Android Pay and Samsung Pay are the most relevant ones and all of them were launched recently. Samsung Pay differentiates from the other two because in addition of supporting NFC technology to be used with new credit card terminals, it uses Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) to communicate to terminals that don’t yet support the new technology by sending the same magnetic code that a credit card would use. This makes it more compatible than other systems as businesses don’t have to upgrade their terminals and it is being advertised as “The most accepted mobile payment”.
Samsung Pay has been available in Korea for a little more than a month, and now there’s an official statement to prove how popular it has been. More than 1.5 million transactions have been made using the company’s system accumulating over $30 million in sales. There is approximately 36 percent of users currently paying with a mobile device and about 10 percent of them are using Samsung Pay daily. Injong Rhee, executive vice president of Samsung Electronics and global head of Samsung Pay said “Although the details on Samsung Pay usage are constantly being updated, the response we’ve received so far has been beyond our expectations, we knew Samsung Pay would be a game-changer in the mobile payments industry and now with the user data, we are seeing the greater impact it is having on consumer behavior and on the lifestyle of our customers.”
Samsung Pay also includes some value-added services in South Korea such as support on some integrated circuit (IC) readers that work with proximity cards, online payments using a debit or credit Samsung Card, ATM cash withdrawal using a Woori bank account and some transportation services and loyalty card memberships will be added soon into the service.
The service will launch on September 28 in the US and it will launch a little later on the UK, Spain and China. The disadvantage for this service is that it is only compatible with Samsung products, and only four of them are currently supported, the Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 Edge, Galaxy S6 Edge+ and the Galaxy Note 5, but as it is more compatible with other terminals, it could attract consumers into the brand. The Gear S2 is also said to support it, although it will be compatible only with terminals that support NFC technology.