Those of us in the payments industry who don’t have an iPhone (yes, we exist) have been looking forward to the launch of Android Pay or Samsung Pay and it looks like Samsung Pay will be first to market with a launch in September as broadly reported yesterday:
Samsung plans to announce today that it will roll out its mobile wallet next month, but there are still open questions about how stores will treat a new type of payment method they haven’t seen before.
The tap-to-pay method will launch in the U.S. on Sept. 28 and come preloaded on the Galaxy S6 Edge+ and Galaxy Note5 on all major carriers except Verizon, which is still in talks with Samsung. A software upgrade will allow current owners of Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge devices to access Samsung Pay, too
The advantage of Samsung Pay is the inclusion of Loop Pay, allowing their wallet to work at merchants even if they do not have NFC capabilities turned on. This is a significant acceptance advantage over Apple Pay. Some are wondering, however, if merchants who haven’t heard much about Samsung Pay are going to be concerned about taking these payments and how it might affect their processing fees and the security of these transactions. Whether Samsung Pay works most places where a card can be swiped is only part of the challenge, though. The other is convincing business owners that a customer is able to —securely able to — pay with their phone in a store that has an old checkout system and doesn’t accept NFC. One can imagine a scenario in which some business owners will insist that they don’t accept mobile payments and try to prevent a transaction from happening. I think merchants come around to accepting Samsung Pay. It’s hard to turn down a consumer purchase. Once merchants see a few transactions go through without having to make an investment in NFC, they may actually embrace it.
Overview by Sarah Grotta, Director, Debit Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
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