Newsletter
Yesterday Samsung announced their answer to the mobile payment race, dubbed Samsung Pay, which is the fruits of the acquisition they made of LoopPay. There had been some talk that Samsung would be looking into launching their own brand of mobile payment system so users who own and use a Samsung device could easily pay for items at checkouts in tons of retail stores, a decision that is undoubtedly aimed at competing against Apple Pay and the upcoming Android Pay solution. The detail which consumers may want to pay the most attention to though is that Samsung Pay is said to work in some 30 million retail locations.
Samsung was quick to point out the comparison to Apple Pay which only reportedly works at thousands of retail locations currently, and the massive gap in compatibility is due to the type if technology that Samsung is using to power Samsung Pay on future mobile devices. Many thought if Samsung actually did launch their own mobile payment platform that it would be NFC based, but Samsung threw people for a loop when it snatched up LoopPay which uses a technology they developed called MST,(Magnetic Secure Transmission)and people immediately started to speculate that Samsung could be using the purchase of LoopPay for its tech to use in its own mobile payment platform. The hunches were correct as that’s exactly what Samsung did.
MST is what makes Samsung Pay so versatile when it comes to paying at the checkout with the just the tap of your device or the wave of your handset over the POS system. MST basically virtualizes a traditional magnetic card swipe just like you were using your credit card or debit card, so there’s no need for retailers to install new machines and use new technology. So far Samsung Pay will only be baked into the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge, and in its launch state users will need the use of the fingerprint sensor that is tucked under the home button. Eventually though Samsung will likely be rolling Samsung Pay out to other devices that may have compatible hardware, however for now it will be a somewhat limited affair. What it will likely do though is further help to kickstart mobile payment platforms into overdrive, which is something the space sorely needs.