Happy birthday, Samsung Pay! You came out not too long after Apple Pay did, and ever since, you’ve embroiled the mobile payments market in a feeding frenzy of firms going after market share.
Your first birthday has come with a lot of news building up to it, and recently, we found there were other gifts connected to the event as well. Turns out Samsung Pay’s first birthday has a lot to offer the users.
The biggest gift to the user base is a string of new features. Samsung Pay now comes equipped with coupon support, as well as membership support and even gift card capabilities to let users search for and use coupons right from the app.
Plus, users will be able to redeem gift cards from the various retailers that participate in Samsung Pay. Plus, cloud storage will also be on hand to allow these various memberships and coupons to transfer to new devices as needed.
It’s not just new features that join in here, as Samsung’s offering over $100,000 in prizes in various events, including Gear S2 smartwatches, one for every day of the year.
With over 500 banks and credit unions in on the action, Samsung Pay has a connection to around 80 percent of the debit and credit card market in the United States. That helps ensure there are plenty of places to use Samsung Pay, and as we’ve seen in some rather effective marketing, sometimes Samsung even manages to go where Apple Pay doesn’t.
Throw in a nice big giveaway effort and Samsung Pay may well draw in a few new users besides, a welcome development for Samsung. The addition of the new features here, however, may be an even more vital move than the giveaway; the giveaway draws interest, but the new features—which in large part seem based on things users clearly want—will be what keeps users in place.
Samsung Pay has already put up an excellent fight against Apple Pay, which was a largely entrenched rival even by the time Samsung stepped into the field. It’s made great strides, and it shows no signs of slowing up any time soon. That’s good news for Samsung, and for the mobile payments community who gets a robust competitive environment to work with.
