Since the launch of Apple Pay several months ago, the service has expanded rapidly, being accepted by numerous businesses around the world. Since then, Google and Samsung have been working to develop their own services to compete with Apple. Today, Samsung began testing its Samsung Pay service in Korea.
Samsung is testing Samsung Pay in Korea to ensure that it is ready before spreading it out to customers around the world. The service, similar to Apple Pay, uses Near Field Communication (NFC) to communicate with other devices and process the payment. Samsung also stated that its service will also work with Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) technologies, claiming that it's the first such service capable of working with both types of interface.
To add a card to Samsung Pay, Samsung set up a system that uses the phone's camera to scan the information off of your credit card and adds it into the account. After that, there are a series of terms of use agreements and authentication notices that you must perform, but according to Samsung this won't take much time.
To ensure the system is safe to use, Samsung has set up a series of security and encryption technologies. Payments cannot be completed without putting in a pin or scanning your fingerprint to ensure you want the payment to proceed, and then a mobile security platform called Samsung KNOX tracks the payment and monitors for any kind of malicious activity. If you lose your smartphone, the "Find My Mobile" service also has the ability to lock your smartphone remotely and wipe all credit card information to avoid theft.
Samsung Pay will first be available on the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 edge devices in Korea, and is expected to ultimately expand to the rest of the world.
Although Samsung has a large chunk of the Android market share, it is still questionable how well this service will work out. Apple Pay is a strong competitor with a large market share, and when Google manages to get its Google Wallet tap-to-pay service finished, it will work on all Android devices, and many retailers will likely choose to support Google's alternative service as it will have more potential users.
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