Remember that time that Samsung acquired mobile payment service LoopPay? Well today Samsung revealed what it’s going to do with LoopPay’s technology.
Samsung Pay is Samsung’s own mobile payment service that utilizes both Near Field Communication (NFC) and Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST), the latter of which is the tech that Samsung gained from its LoopPay acquisition. NFC is a feature that many other mobile payment services are based on, but they require terminals that support NFC as well. MST doesn’t require a special terminal, though, instead using traditional magstripe terminals. That means that Samsung Pay should work with many more terminals at launch than NFC-only competitors like Apple Pay.
Once you’ve loaded up the Samsung Pay app, you can enter your credit card information to store them there for easy access. Samsung notes that its app doesn’t keep personal account numbers on your device, instead providing security features and tokenization to replace credit card data with unique, secure tokens to prevent fraud and protect your data.
When you’re ready to make a payment, you dive into the Samsung Pay app, choose the card that you’d like to pay with, then tap your device to the terminal. You can authenticate the payment with your device’s fingerprint sensor and then you’ll be good to go.
Samsung Pay will launch in the U.S. and Korea this summer, and Samsung says that the feature will roll out to other regions like Europe and China later on. The feature will be available on both the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge.