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Samsung Pay expanding to UK, Spain, Australia, and more

By Rad Slavov

Updated: Jan 05, 2016, 5:25 PM

Samsung

Samsung Pay — the one mobile payment service that works with magnetic stripe card terminals — has thus far been available exclusively to customers in the US and South Korea. However, Samsung has just announced its plans to expand the service's availability to other markets later year.

Although the company didn't specify exactly when we should expect Samsung Pay's expansion to take place, it at least revealed the markets which are going to get it. Those are the UK, Spain, Australia, China, Singapore and Brazil. We presume that Samsung will be gradually introducing Pay across these countries, so expect further details to be disclosed in the months to follow. Additionally, the company has promised that Gear S2 smartwatch owners will be able to handle Samsung Pay transactions through their wearables at some point later in 2016.

Unlike Apple Pay and Android Pay, Samsung Pay (did all of them really had to call their services "Pay"?) works with not only NFC-enabled terminals, but also ones that rely solely on the aging magnetic stripe technology. Samsung is able to do so with Pay, thanks to a technology called MST (Magnetic Secure Transmission), which it acquired along with the company that invented it – LoopPay, back in February last year. An interesting case got some attention this October: LoopPay's office network got penetrated by a hacker group, believed to be affiliated with the Chinese government, but Samsung was quick to report that the breach had nothing to do with the Samsung Pay network, and that the security issue that allowed this to happen had been taken care of.

source: Samsung

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Rad Slavov is the Editor-in-Chief at PhoneArena. He joined the media in 2008, right on the cusp of the modern smartphone revolution. Through time and perseverance, he amassed a great deal of knowledge and industry know-how, allowing him to guide and organize the company's growing line-up of talented content creators and ever-expanding content portfolio.

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