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Samsung Pay: Coming Soon to Take on Apple Pay?

December 18, 2023         By: Steven Anderson

While Apple Pay is readily regarded as one of the single biggest shakeups to the mobile payment landscape, there are plenty of alternatives out there as banks, mobile operators and software makers alike all look to get in on the action and get a slice of the mobile payment market.

But now, one company is said to be readying its own offering, and this may well be the biggest shakeup since Apple Pay, coming from no less than Samsung.

The reports suggest that Samsung is in talks with payment startup LoopPay to bring a breed of mobile payments system to Samsung devices, set for a debut sometime in 2015. Under the terms of such an arrangement, if it comes to pass, Samsung device users would be able to simply wave a Samsung phone at a payment terminal, using near field communication technology to wirelessly process payments.

With LoopPay in on the action, a phone would essentially be able to mimic a mag-stripe and EMV card , and the wave would in turn mimic a swiped card. But LoopPay doesn’t specifically require near field communications technology to operate, or any other wireless standard, so that opens the field up from there and gives a great potential operating base.

LoopPay’s proprietary Magnetic Secure Transmission technology could find itself embedded into future Samsung devices, allowing Samsung device users to pay at any retailer with a payment card reader.

Reports also suggest that a Samsung payment system may incorporate several new advancements, including tokenization and fingerprint recognition systems to help bolster security, and given that the Samsung Galaxy S5 includes fingerprint recognition, that’s a particularly important point.

This is a staggering idea, for a great many reasons.

While Samsung is somewhat late to the party here, and will thus be facing down some at least slightly entrenched rivals, there’s no denying that Samsung has a huge install base out there, which means plenty of potential users.

What’s more, Samsung has a decent presence in the United States, but actually has a much greater presence in the rest of the world, where it’s even been seen to beat Apple in terms of market share.

While Apple Pay has a pretty pronounced install base, Samsung might instead choose to concede the United States to Apple while proceeding on to the rest of the world. There’s a lot of business to be had in places like South Korea, Japan…and even China, and that’s before you get the populous regions of India and Europe.

Even Africa’s been regarded as a major mobile payments market in the making, and Samsung may be able to make a great case in these other regions. But Samsung will likely have to act quickly here in order to derail Apple Pay before it can make its case to larger portions of the world; already Apple Pay has been seen making a move on Europe.

The sooner Samsung can get this project from report to reality, the better off it will likely be in the wider market.

Naturally, there’s no way to tell how this will come out until Samsung actually releases its mobile payment product, a development slated for some time in 2015. But if Samsung does bring out a Samsung Pay of sorts, Apple may be in for an even bigger fight than it has with CurrentC.