Samsung announced today at their Galaxy Note 5 launch that their Samsung Pay service will roll out in Korea this month with a US launch to follow in September.
Samsung Pay is Samsung’s own implementation of a mobile payments solution which will be in direct competition to Google’s own Android Pay mobile payment solution.
Samsung has had some initial delays in launching their service since its announcement back in April, but at today’s Unpacked event they announced that the service would go live in Korea on August 20 and in the USA on September 28.
Following their acquisition of LoopPay earlier this year, Samsung’s Galaxy S6, S6 Edge and now the Note 5 and S6 Edge+ devices have the technology to use both the more traditional, Near Field Communication (NFC) for mobile payments but also LoopPay’s Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST).
MST allows Samsung devices to emulate the information traditionally stored on magnetic stripe cards and send that information – via close proximity – to a payment terminal. The advantage to this technology is that LoopPay suggested that it was compatible with 90% of the existing Point of Sale terminals in use in the USA. This is less of a benefit in Australia though, where contactless payment terminals are becoming almost ubiquitous.
Like Android Pay, Samsung Pay will use tokenized transactions. This means that the system never uses your actual credit card number or account number, rather generating a random one time payment token and passing it to the merchant. This increases the security of the service and greatly reduces the potential for hacking your account information.
Samsung has announced partnerships with all major credit card services, advising that American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa are all on board for the launch.
While today’s announcements focused on the launch of the service in Samsung’s home market of Korea and the USA, Samsung Australia has confirmed that they are working to bring Samsung Pay to Australia in 2016. Prasad Gokhale – Vice President, IT & Mobile at Samsung Australia:
Samsung Electronics Australia is currently working with local financial institutions to customise Samsung Pay with an anticipated launch in 2016. We look forward to sharing more information closer to the launch.
During today’s announcement Samsung also announced that they are planning to launch Samsung Pay in the near future in U.K., Spain and China.
With NFC payment terminals being so widely distributed throughout Australia it would seem that Australia would be the perfect market drive mobile payment adoption.
Are you excited for the potential of Mobile Payments? Is Samsung Pay a service you’re looking forward too? Let us know in the comments.
Read all about Samsung’s Unpacked August launches
Argh, not another one. I just want one that is available across all phones and everyone will support. Not this hodge podge of different devices and vendors.