LG Pay Not Dead After All; Hits South Korea This Summer
The death of LG Pay has apparently been exaggerated, as new word out of LG Electronics says that, this June, it will launch a mobile payments service on the new G6 smartphone, which only recently went on sale to begin with.
The latest reports say that LG Pay will work in a fashion similar to Samsung Pay, using magnetic secure transmission to affect payment only when the G6 is held against a payment card reader. Word about future expansion, meanwhile, is out of the picture as yet, as LG is staying quiet on several key details ranging from fees to plans to offer up LG Pay in other countries.
What’s so odd about this is that we’d heard, just a month ago, reports that LG wasn’t putting the LG Pay system on the G6 at all due to a sheer lack of time to get the system engineered for the G6, and large portions of the program may have been canceled outright, including the White Card system.
What exactly changed in the last six weeks to go from “We don’t have time to make this thing and we may well kill part or all of it off” to “It’s coming out in June” is unclear.
Even back then, the idea that LG Pay would have been killed off may have seemed outlandish; after all, why would LG refuse even a small amount of extra business? It likely wouldn’t have taken much to add a mobile payment system to a device, and for LG to add its own payment system to its own device surely would have proven sufficiently welcome to at least some users to make it worthwhile.
There’s a lot of competition in the mobile payment space, as we see here most every day. LG is very much late to this party, but with so much competition already in the field, it’s a safe bet that some will start departing the market fairly soon. That may be just the opportunity LG needs to get in the field, though only time will tell if it works out that way.