SEOUL, South Korea—Samsung has delayed the start of its mobile payment service, Samsung Pay, until September.
Originally expected to be released in July, the delay puts Samsung further behind competing mobile payments solutions Apple Pay, and newly released Android Pay.
Samsung Pay will debut in the U.S. and South Korea in conjunction with the company’s next high-end mobile device, Bloomberg Business reported.
On March 1, Samsung unveiled its own digital wallet in response to Apple Pay. The payments solution works with traditional magnetic-stripe terminals, and also comes with NFC capability. The company says the system will likely be accepted at over 90% of retail locations, giving it potentially 10 times the reach of Apple Pay.
Earlier this year Samsung purchased LoopPay, the payments tech behind Samsung Pay. LoopPay works differently than Apple Pay, using what it calls "magnetic secure transmission," which "spoofs" a traditional card swipe with magnetic fields when users hold their device near a payment terminal.
While LoopPay’s current POS acceptance is much greater than Apple Pay’s NFC-based system, there is debate over how well the solution functions at existing mag-stripe terminals—and greater concern over how LoopPay might perform once chip-card readers become widespread after the October 2015 Visa and MasterCard liability shift deadline. Most new chip-card readers come with NFC built in, which will give a big boost to Apple Pay.
Samsung Pay could begin to gain a great deal of traction with consumers because of its greater POS acceptance, said Bill Hardekopf, CEO of LowCards.com in a previous report, noting there are more phones on the market with the Android operating system than iOS.