With the mobile payments industry expected to get bigger with every passing year, tech companies, banks and financial institutes are all trying to jump on to the bandwagon by introducing new platforms that can potentially define the way we pay for goods and services in the not-so-distant future. Or at least that’s what the companies would want to believe anyways. That being the case, Samsung Electronics is pushing its Samsung Pay pretty hard in recent times. The mobile payments service from the South Korean company is a serious contender in the sector and is expected to be one of the major players in the industry, alongside the likes of Android Pay from Google, and Apple Pay from the Cupertino, CA-based tech company.
The latest Samsung Pay ad released by the South Korean company shows comedian Hannibal Buress making a trip to Katz’s, the New York Deli immortalized in the famous scene from the 1989 romantic comedy ‘When Harry met Sally’, starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal. The ad tries to disprove the notion that every payment made through smartphones basically has to be via Apply Pay, by showing the funnyman pretty much giving the Katz’s staff a bit of a lesson as to how easy it is to make and accept payments through Samsung Pay. The company also doesn’t fail to highlight the obvious technological advantage it has over Apple Pay; the fact that regular magnetic card terminals are capable of processing payments made through the platform, unlike Apple’s offering, which requires NFC-enabled terminals, which are much rarer and cost upwards of $500 each.
That technological advantage for Samsung Pay can be put down to the company’s acquisition of LoopPay, which has allowed the platform to use Magnetic Security Transmission (MST) for its transactions, just like any old credit or debit card. While one major disadvantage for both Samsung and Apple is that their payment systems work only on select premium smartphones from the company, Android Pay, in theory, should work with any Android handset with an NFC chip in it. It remains to be seen which platform wins out in the end, but the battle is only just beginning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czcb5dXjlZA