Samsung Pay Moves to September Launch, Targets China and Europe

Apple Pay may be dominant on a lot of fronts in the mobile payment war, but starting this September, it’s going to have something of a fight on its hands as Apple’s perennial competitor and occasional supplier Samsung fires up its own mobile payment option in Samsung Pay.

But Samsung isn’t just here to compete with Apple; it has a plan of its own for the mobile payments market, and that plan focuses quite a bit on China and Europe.

Samsung Pay’s plan is to launch in September—a bit of a delay from original plans to launch in “the summer,” though it should be noted that summer’s last day is September 22 this year, so it may hit that summer mark—in the United States and South Korea.

Following that initial launch, though not on any particular set schedule, expansion will follow into China and Europe.

While Apple Pay does still dominate a large part of the market thanks to its wide user base, there’s one point worth noting: Samsung Pay offers one critical advantage over its competitor thanks to the nature of its operation.

Since Samsung Pay uses a combination of near-field communication (NFC) and its acquisition LoopPay’s Magnetic Secure Transmission to let people pay for things, it requires no formal agreement with stores to use, and can be used with any system that currently takes a credit card.

But it will still have to face down not only Apple Pay—which works at an increasingly large number of retailers—but also systems like Android Pay, which work with four major credit card brands: MasterCard, Visa, Discover and American Express.

With Android Pay also set to work with several different brands, including Groupon and Lyft, it will pose a significant challenge to Samsung Pay’s hopeful aspirations. Worse, Android Pay might actually limit Samsung Pay’s total reach to just Samsung devices; not that that’s strictly bad as Samsung is a pretty big deal, but any time a market is limited, it can be a problem.

We all knew that the mobile payment race was going to be tight, and that a lot of brands being unveiled might well not make it long after their launch.

But will we end up with a balkanized system in which everyone’s phone comes with a mobile payment system and no one uses anyone else’s? Will we end up with people changing mobile device makers on the strength of who has the best mobile payment system?

How long until we get a kind of Microsoft Pay involved for its various mobiles? And how will a potential move from mobile to wearable devices impact all of this? One way or another, though, we’re likely to see how this all boils down sooner rather than later, and that’s big news for all concerned.