Samsung Pay Coming Soon, No Need for Vendors to Have NFC

When Samsung debuted their Galaxy S6 lineup this past April, they teased their own forthcoming mobile payment system (á la Apple Pay, Google Wallet), and now we have a projected launch window. Senior Vice President, Rhee Injong announced June 3rd that Samsung Pay will launch in the US and South Korea sometime this September, in time to coincide with Samsung’s next flagship smartphone release. A followup release in China and South America was hinted; however, no specific details were given as to when that would be.

While effectively identical to its competition, Samsung Pay promises to stand out above the competition in at least one major way: it interfaces with magnetic strip readers in existing payment terminals. This is a big deal because many stores and vendors have yet to adopt Near Field Communication (NFC) readers that systems such as Apple Pay and Google Wallet rely on. This is all thanks to Samsung’s recent acquisition of LoopPay, which touts something called Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) that allows users to put their phone near a normal swipe terminal and it’ll get picked up by the terminal magically, and moreover, the technology needed for this to work is already existent in the current Galaxy S6 lineup.

With this nifty new technology at the heart of Samsung Pay, how long will it be before Apple implements a similar technology to keep pace?