At the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked launch event, the South Korean company has also officially unveiled Samsung Pay, its wireless mobile payment system. It is also Samsung’s very ambitious mission to compete with Apple Pay.
Although rumours of Samsung’s Apply pay competitor appeared as far back as two months ago with a supposed deal with US-based company LoopPay, there had been some question marks as to whether the deal actually went through. Based on Samsung Pay’s features, it can be safely assumed that the system is likely based on LoopPay’s tech.
Samsung Pay works similarly to Apple Pay, where you link your credit card to your smartphone and pay at counters by just tapping your phone on existing NFC-enabled terminals, and verifying your identity with your fingerprint via the fingerprint sensor. But, given that NFC-enabled terminals are not widely available, Samsung Pay also incorporates two other payment technologies, which are barcodes and the older Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) standard. With support for all three payment technologies, Samsung Pay promises to cover up to 90% of all retailer point-of-sale (POS) machines worldwide.
That being said, mobile payments technology has a very low take-up rate anywhere outside of the US. Hence, Samsung Pay will only be available to Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge users in the US and South Korea when this feature rolls out sometime in Q3 this year. The company will then assess other markets before pushing out this feature.
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