Samsung Pay Team Talks MST, Rivals

Samsung Pay celebrated its one-year anniversary earlier this month, and the party is still going. The company has posted a new interview with three key members of the mPayment platform’s development team.

Unsurprisingly, Samsung Pay’s MST technology remains a standout topic for the developers. It emulates traditional magnetic stripe cards to enable compatibility POS terminals even if they don’t support the kind of NFC technology needed by mPayment platforms like Apple Pay.

Describing the merchant response to the app, Senior Manager Jake Kim says the typical initial response was generally, “Sorry, we don’t accept mobile payments,” which “turns into disbelief. ‘Did it really work?’ Which then leads to an enthusiastic ‘Wow!’ when they realize Samsung Pay works on their legacy point-of-sale (POS) terminals”.

Of course, there have been challenges, and the emergence of rival systems doesn’t elude the team’s conversation. Director Seunghan Dan says that competition in the mobile wallet market “is very fierce,” adding that OEMs “aren’t the only ones out there; many issuing banks and even telecom operators are investing a lot to launch their own mobile wallets.”

Samsung Pay is in a strong position, though. While the metrics for this market are still emerging, it appears to be one of the top mPayment brands, alongside Apple Pay, and Samsung says its service has seen nearly 100 million transactions since its launch.