LG Joining the Mobile Payment Market With “G Pay” Service?

What a difference a month makes, huh? It was just back in September, when we took note of how mobile payments were looking to be individual parts of larger platforms rather than stand-alone applications and asked the question “What’s stopping a Huawei Pay or an LG Pay from emerging?”.

While we didn’t project that there was much standing in the way, there are new reports that suggest that’s exactly what’s happening, at least for LG.

The service in question isn’t set to be called “LG Pay,” however; it’s actually said to be called “G Pay,” and word about the service has come in from several sources, including perhaps the most compelling, the filing for trademarks on G Pay in both the United States and South Korea.

Further, word from LG Electronics Director Kim Jong Hoon made it clear that LG was planning to at some point the company was ready to enter the mobile payments market, an idea which meshes together nicely with the filing for trademarks. Further reports from unnamed “industry insiders” suggest that G Pay may have a particular edge over Samsung Pay, though just what that edge is is unclear, particularly given how versatile Samsung Pay has already demonstrated itself to be.

Samsung Pay, after all, works with both near-field communication and magnetic strip readers, so just what G Pay could do to top that is about as unclear as it is exciting. It’d have to do something really impressive to top Samsung Pay in terms of sheer versatility.

But it certainly could end up doing just that; it’s not clear just what LG has in the pipeline that we don’t even know about yet. It could well have a Samsung Pay killer on its hands. But this is a bar that has been set tremendously high; not only is Samsung Pay about to get an edge in terms of release time, but it likely won’t be long before Android Pay follows.

Worse yet, LG will have to go on better than a year after the launch of Apple Pay, a development which has all but certainly eliminated most of the Apple user base from joining in. But LG is a popular brand in the Android field—it’s one of the biggest after Samsung—so the idea that it might be able to appeal to its own user base is reasonable enough.

G Pay is going to be walking into a hotly competitive market that could well eat it alive. It’s going to take a lot for G Pay to outclass its competitors, and seeing just what it has in mind should be impressive. While it will have some advantage with a market that’s familiar with LG products, it’s still going to have a lot on its plate to keep users from jumping ship to a platform with a better mobile payments system.