After what appears to be a successful trial in South Korea, Samsung Pay landed in the United States on September 28. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint all offered support for Samsung’s payment platform since day one, with Verizon subscribers missing out on it for the time being. Now that Samsung Pay finally became usable by Verizon customers, the platform is now supported by all four major carriers in the US, an important milestone for any mobile payment platform.
One big advantage that Samsung Pay holds over competing products such as Android Pay or Apple Pay is compatibility with both NFC as well as magnetic secure transactions (MST) payment terminals. While NFC terminal adoption is snowballing, MST payments are accepted by 90% of all retailers on the globe. Here’s a promotional video that demonstrates how easy it is to use Samsung Pay with magnetic-based terminals:
Although Samsung Pay seems to have solved compatibility problems on the retailer and carrier ends, at the moment, the payment platform is not doing very well in terms of partner banks. At the moment, Samsung Pay only works with debit/credit cards from the Bank of America, Citi, U.S. Bank, or Synchrony Financial.
