Samsung has announced that starting this coming Thursday, June 16th, customers will be able to use Samsung Pay at a wide range of merchants throughout the country. The announcement means that the contactless payment option from Samsung is now accepted in an ever increasing number of countries as phone-based, contactless purchases continue to gain momentum.
“Since the introduction of Samsung Pay last year, we have seen great momentum and experienced significant consumer adoption. Samsung Pay has redefined the way consumers pay and use their smartphones,” said Thomas Ko, Vice President and Global Co-General Manager of Samsung Pay at Samsung Electronics. “We are excited to bring this service to Singapore consumers and we hope to introduce value-added services to drive and lead innovation in mobile commerce, giving consumers a safer, smarter and better mobile wallet.”
Because of the way Samsung Pay works – leveraging Magnetic Secure Transmission – it can be accepted a significantly larger number of pay terminals than the likes of the NFC secure based Android Pay or Apple Pay. It will even work on non-contactless terminals. It’s a big leg up but, to this point, has only been available on Samsung devices.
When the service rolls out this week, users of the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 4G+, S6 edge+ 4G+, S7 4G+ and S7 edge 4G+ devices will be able to use their phones with the Samsung Pay app to make
You Can Use Samsung Pay on the Galaxy S7
their purchases with their devices instead of having to pull out their wallets and credit or debit cards. In all there will be 40 preferred merchants when the service launches on Thursday. Those merchants range from convenient stores to department stores to travel and entertainment merchants.
The question will remain who at the end of the day will win: Samsung Pay or Android Pay. Given that the latter is on a larger swath of devices, it is likely to eventually come out ahead but equally, with the number of Samsung devices in the market, they could certainly make a run for it, especially if they open the service up to non-Samsung devices.
If you have a compatible Samsung device and haven’t checked out the app, you can download it from the Play Store.
