LG Pay’s Launch Pushed Back to 2017

The dominance of device-based mobile payment systems is pretty clear at this point, with Apple Pay and Samsung Pay being two major market leaders for the whole of mobile payments.

Their success has spawned a few imitators, and one of the first to emerge conceptually was LG Pay.

However, the conceptual release isn’t exactly matching up to reality, as new reports have emerged pushing LG Pay’s release back to 2017.

This was an odd report; word about LG Pay goes back to last January with the emergence of the LG Pay card in South Korea. With the incoming arrival of the LG V20 smartphone, regarded by many as LG’s newest flagship smartphone, many thought that LG Pay would come along with it.

That’s not to be, though, as reports suggest that LG is having trouble actually testing the service in South Korea.

That’s a puzzle, and it only gets weirder. Apparently, the reports note, the service is having issues pairing with the “White Card” that was recently revealed, as that card wasn’t actually offered up commercially.

It’s only recently finished development, and as it represents a card that contains credit and debit card information that connects to a smartphone by near-field communications (NFC), it’s likely a big part of LG Pay’s overall operations. The card is developed, but getting it to the testing phase is proving difficult.

Any amount of delay in this market only hurts LG, which is already pretty far behind the curve. It’s lost a lot of potential market to various competitors in the field, and it can scarcely afford to lose more trying to get its product to the commercial release stage.

That’s going to force it to try and skim customers out of other systems’ markets, and that’s a tall order unless you’ve got a powerful product that’s got a lot of features the competitors just plain don’t. That’s not the situation to be in, and it’s even worse now that there’s a further delay.

If LG can’t get its product to market until 2017, it had better be focusing on delivering services others don’t right now, because it’s not likely to break users out of entrenched competitors’ systems on the strength of just another mobile payments app.