News out of South Korea indicates that Samsung Pay, the mobile payment service from Samsung Electronics, has now attained over a million users in South Korea alone. The company announced as much on Sunday, claiming that around 100,000 daily transactions are made through the system in the country, at various convenience stores, department stores, supermarkets and restaurants. Overall, 100 billion won ($88 million) worth of payments have been made by way of Samsung Pay ever since the service was introduced earlier this year, with the daily average hovering around the 2 billion won ($1.8 million) mark in recent times, as opposed to about 800 million won ($705,192) in the first few weeks of the availability of the service.
Samsung Pay of course, is the mobile payment system on offer from multinational consumer electronics company Samsung, and was originally launched in the company’s home base of South Korea earlier this year. The service was then rolled out to users in the US back in September. Earlier this month, reports indicated that the company is prepping the global rollout of Samsung Pay, and is even transferring its employees from other units to its wireless business division, which is the unit in charge of Samsung Pay. The service is currently available exclusively to users in South Korea and the US, but the aforementioned report seemed to indicate that the company is looking to launch the service in the UK, Spain and China over the next few months, now that it is starting to gain some amount of traction in its home market.
Coming to mobile payment systems, Samsung Pay is expected to be one of the major players in the market, once NFC payments become the norm over the next few years. Some industry insiders have even claimed that the system might one day eventually replace the credit card for good, although, that is unlikely to happen any time soon by the looks of it. As for Samsung pay, it uses Magnetic Security Transmission (MST) for its transactions, meaning regular NFC-enabled magnetic card terminals at stores are capable of processing the payments, which only need the presence of an NFC chip in the users’ smartphones. The company recently tied up with a number of global financial institutes like MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Bank of America and Citi as part of its larger international push.