Did you completely forget about Samsung Pay? Well, it’s still kicking. After a significant delay, the official launch is coming in a couple of months and Samsung is allegedly wrapping up tests to ensure it works properly.
Samsung is testing its Apple Pay competitor with eight different card companies in South Korea and is set to go live there as well as in the United States this September.
Due to technical issues, a Samsung representative told BusinessKorea about Samsung Pay’s delay. “Samsung Electronics has decided to delay the release date of Samsung Pay from July to Sept. 1st in a bid to make it technically perfect. To minimize the error rates, the company is carrying out various tests.”
The company announced Samsung Pay back in March with plans for release this summer. It might just be able to make that deadline. Samsung is apparently having issues with its payment technology, which ditches near-field communication (NFC) in favor of its own recipe: magnetic card formation and fingerprint scanning. Compatible Samsung devices will be able to copy the magnetic field of cards and then trigger a Credit Authorization Terminal like physical cards do to wirelessly process payments in stores.
It’s difficult to determine whether Samsung Pay might be altogether too late at this point. The time keeps ticking, especially since Apple announced its mobile payment system, Apple Pay, in September 2014. It’s gotten off to a moderately successful start, while there seems to be significantly less hype surrounding Samsung Pay. Google will also release Android Pay soon, a separate payment platform, but Samsung is opting for its own proprietary solution.
We’ll see soon if that decision pays off.
