Samsung announced today their own NFC payment system which will come pre-installed in phones called ‘Samsung Pay’.
We reported on Samsung’s acquisition of LoopPay, a system that mimics the swiping of a credit card in an electronic fashion, without having to actually swipe anything. This is different than Google Wallet and Apple Pay which only work on NFC-enable registers, a fraction of all checkout systems currently used. Samsung now publicized their plans to have a ‘Samsung Pay’ system as well, which will work in tap-and-pay fashion using NFC technology.
The move is not a replacement to the LoopPay capability; new phones will have both the LoopPay payment method and the NFC payment methods available. Samsung Pay will begin rolling out this summer, and will come pre-loaded on Samsung phones, including the new Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. The usage of the tap-and-pay will be similar to Apple Pay in which the user authenticates themselves with a fingerprint and then taps the phone to the register.
If the user experience is done right, the company could be a formidable competitor in the mobile payments market due to the versatility of being able to make payments on virtually all POS systems, with the choice of using NFC or without, bringing the payment system to millions of point-of-sale terminals worldwide.
The competition heats up as Google just bought into Softcard. Google also announced recently plans for ‘Android Pay’, an alternative system to Google Wallet, which will be launched in May. The system is meant specifically for in-app and in-store payments of third-party apps. It won’t replace Wallet – both systems will co-exist.
One important difference between Apple and Samsung’s system versus Google’s system is that in the case of the latter Google is actually processing the transaction and sees the details of the transaction, while in the case of the former the phone is just a replacement to the credit card and no information goes through to Apple and Samsung.
It’s interesting that all are calling their systems with the ‘Pay’ suffix, and that there’s so much activity in the mobile payments market within the span of a few months, since Apple unveiled Apple Pay.
