It seems as though everyone and their brother has some sort of mobile payments system to offer their customers these days. Apple and Samsung have their own payment methods, and of course Google has given everyone on Android the gift of Android Pay. Huawei is opening their own in China, and someone we’ve heard a lot about opening up their own mobile payments system for some time now is LG. We’ve seen leaked images of some sort of smart credit card, but now we’re hearing about technology which could be used inside of the upcoming LG G6, and it sounds a lot like the technology that makes Samsung Pay so useful.
According to a report from ETNews, the LG G6 will feature MST technology, otherwise known as Magnetic Secure Transmission, which Samsung is using in the Galaxy S6, Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S7 line of devices to make Samsung Pay so usable. The reason MST is perhaps easier to use than NFC for payments is that the MST chips inside of those Samsung phones allow Samsung Pay users to simulate the swiping of a credit or debit card, allowing users to pay with their phone on hardware that could be over a decade older than the phone in question. Industry representatives are being quoted by ETNews as saying that this is the route that LG is going to go down when launching the G6 and LG Pay, and it wouldn’t be too much of a surprise if they did. In South Korea, LG and Samsung are staunch rivals, and there has always been an air of “anything you can do, I can do better” about their rivalry.
Of course, should LG put MST inside of their new smartphones, it could be the start of many more device manufacturers following suit. if that were to happen, then we could all benefit from the emergence of such a technology, as it does make it a lot easier to pay for things with a smartphone no matter where you are. Given that Samsung Pay has struggled to gain as much ground as Apple Pay, and has yet to launch in large markets like the United Kingdom or Canada, it’s clear that LG Pay – or whatever name the South Korean giant gives it – will be facing something of an uphill battle.