There’s a smaller battle waging within the never-ending smartphone wars that Samsung just managed to heat up: mobile payments.
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Not to be outdone by its rival Apple, Samsung has announced that Samsung Pay will be available to U.S. consumers starting next month. “The list of partners will only grow”.
While a number of executives at these institutions have kind words for Samsung Pay, Discover’s Dian Offereins is particularly positive, “Discover’s focus on simplicity and versatility aligns with Samsung Pay’s innovative use of technology”.
But despite getting a final date for Samsung Pay’s launch, Samsung still wasn’t able to say which credit cards, banks, and other financial institutions will be compatible with the service. (Available for all Android phones running 4.4 KitKat or later, Google’s NFC-based Android Pay will work on far more of the firm’s phones than its own Samsung Pay.). “As part of that strategy, we are excited to work with Samsung to offer Card Members a new, innovative way to pay in-store with an American Express Card on their Samsung devices”.
We were looking at this very holistically and said, ‘how can we make an impact in the payment industry?’ …
Samsung Pay will also take a few more steps to use.
Given that your intimate card details aren’t shown and a fingerprint is needed to green light a transaction, there are no security concerns with these welcome corner-cutting ways.
Also, a free software upgrade will be rolled out beginning mid-August, to enable Samsung Pay on Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge devices in the United States and South Korea. A new mobile payment system is also been introduced by the firm for attracting customers.
That’s because Samsung Pay will work nearly everywhere. Samsung may be launching this Smartwatch to compete with the Apple Watch because the Design of the watch will be pretty much familiar with the Apple watch.
That said, there’s at least one possible reason to point to for Samsung Pay’s limited availability. With all three services, you’re assigned a substitute card number unique to the phone.
The mobile phone directly sends signals to the magnetic stripe card readers and the payment is done in seconds. Samsung claims that it will work with most existing point-of-sale (POS) terminals used to read credit cards. Mobile payments are really heating up in 2015.
Samsung Pay will work with a broader range of merchants.
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And then there’s Apple Pay, which finally saw Apple adopt NFC (near field communication) technology so mobile payments could be done without loading an app. “This is a huge milestone for us”.
