Samsung Pay, which launched in South Korea in August, is now available for use by USA consumers.
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Unlike Samsung Pay, Apple Pay only uses NFC technology, which means it can only be used at retailers with NFC-enabled payment terminals. Verifone, the world’s largest provider of secure electronic POS solutions – mostly sliding magnetic-card terminals – welcomes Samsung Pay, because its clients don’t have to change out their hardware anytime soon. In the first month, users have spent more than $30 million using the service through more than 1.5 million total transactions, the company said. Samsung also used the commercial to highlight that Samsung Pay has the early backing of major payment networks and issuers. U.S. Bank, Citi Bank, and Bank of America are on board for supporting the mobile payment option as well. Verizon doesn’t yet support Samsung Pay, but Samsung said it’s still working with the wireless carrier on preloading the service on Verizon phones.
US Cellular has just rolled out starting today the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop to Samsung’s new releases Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge+ via OTA release.
What’s more, if you lose your phone, you don’t have to worry about someone using your credit card, because your card number isn’t stored on your handset.
Also factor in that it is only available on Samsung devices and competes on those devices with Android Pay, and the initial Samsung Pay USA user base is probably small, despite widespread acceptance. It’s a bit limited now, but once Samsung Pay is fully accepted everywhere, it has to potential to completely take over both Apple and Android Pay, mainly because it works virtually everywhere. Since MST is the same kind of magnetic code that credit card readers are compatible with already, Samsung Pay should work with virtually any self-checkout register, given you’re equipped with the proper hardware. This technology is called LoopPay, which Samsung acquired back in February and integrated into its latest devices.
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Next week, Samsung (NASDAQOTH:SSNLF) will launch its mobile payments feature in the U.S. If there was ever a time when Samsung needed something new to help the company, it’s now.
