Better late than never—that would be LG Pay now landing on U.S. shores after launching in South Korea in 2017. With the mobile pay market already a crowded field, LG Pay comes with some significant limitations. For starters, it’s only available on the LG G8 ThinQ phone, although the smartphone maker says other LG models will soon follow. Also, LG Pay only supports Mastercard and Visa from a handful of partner banks, but it did land Chase and US Bank among card issuers.
On the plus side, similar to Samsung Pay, LG Pay works with POS terminals that support both Near Field Communication (NFC) as well as Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST). The latter protocol means that older POS terminals that still only take card swiping will accept LG Pay. Apple Pay and Google Pay only work with NFC terminals. Even though the vast majority of POS terminals in the U.S. are NFC compatible, there are many small businesses that have not made the transition. Apple Pay and Google Pay will not lose sleep over the new LG Pay competition, but at least consumers have another choice in the proximity mobile payment market. How many of them will actually use LG Pay remains to be seen.
A The Verge article discusses more on this topic which is excerpted below.
Four years after Samsung introduced a tap-to-pay mobile wallet that works practically anywhere your credit card does — even older magnetic-stripe card readers — and two years after LG started testing it in Korea, LG’s rival LG Pay has finally arrived in the United States.
That might be pretty intriguing if you’re an LG smartphone owner, because it’s a way more flexible payment tech than most other rivals on the market. Where Apple Pay and Google Pay only work with newer payment terminals that support near-field communication (NFC), LG Pay allows your phone to generate a magnetic signal that looks — to the reader — just like you swiped a traditional magstripe credit card.
But as Android Central reports, the new tech comes with two significant caveats, first of which that it only works (for now) with the LG G8 ThinQ phone, a device we found gimmicky and generally uncompetitive in our recent review, and a device that’s reportedly sold uncharacteristically poorly, to the point that we started seeing it on deep discount within a few months of its release. (Incidentally, LG quit making phones in its home country of Korea shortly after the launch.)
Overview by Raymond Pucci, Director, Merchant Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
