At Mobile World Congress 2015 Samsung announced its new payments service that had long been rumored. Samsung Pay will go live in the U.S. and South Korea later this year and when it finally arrives merchants won’t have to pay any fees on the transactions processed through this service. This is just one of the ways that Samsung is making sure adoption of its new service is much faster than that of Apple Pay, which is currently available in the U.S. only.
Samsung Pay has another thing going for it. The services uses both NFC and MST (magnetic secure transmission) which means that Samsung Pay can be used with conventional credit card readers. On the other hand to use Apple Pay merchants have to get NFC terminals since the service doesn’t support MST.
As far as fees is concerned with Apple Pay there’s a 15 cent fee which means for every $100 processed through its service Apple earns 15 cents. Samsung had intended to charge 15 cents for every $10,000 processed in mobile payments but reports out of Korea claim the company won’t be doing that.
Granted that the report talks about Samsung waiving fees for all merchants in South Korea, the possibility exists that Samsung might go down the same route in the U.S., where Apple Pay has the strongest presence.
Waiving fees will certainly go a long way in enticing merchants to adopt Samsung’s new payment service. Couple that with the fact that they don’t need to get additional hardware to process payments, Samsung Pay could end up rapidly increasing its presence in the market.
Filed in . Read more about Apple Pay and Samsung Pay.