I’ll forgive you if you had forgotten all about Samsung Pay, as we are still waiting on the consumer launch following the service’s unveiling back in March. As part of the pre-launch schedule, sources states that Samsung and eight South Korean card companies have been thoroughly testing Samsung Pay, to ensure that it’is ready for public launch.
According to financial industry sources, Samsung is investigating and testing issues with the technology used to beam information to conventional card readers that rely on magnetic fields to send and receive data. Apparently, this technology hasn’t been working as smoothly has expected on older card readers, resulting in a failure to recognize the transactions all the time. Repeatedly having to retry authentication would certainly be frustrating for users.
There are more than 100 different types of CAT terminals in use throughout Korea. More than 50 percent of them are thought to be more than 10 years old and could struggle to work efficiently with Samsung Pay. As a result, Samsung has brought local card companies on board in order to conduct multiple tests and iron out the issues before the consumer launch.
For a recap, Samsung Pay works with a number of different payment methods, and emulates magnetic cards by creating a magnetic field to activate a Credit Authorization Terminal once the user has cleared the payment using the fingerprint scanner.
“Samsung Electronics has decided to delay the release date of Samsung Pay from July to Sept. 1st in a bid to make it technically perfect.” – anonymous official
According to an official familiar with development, this is the reason why Samsung decided to delay the launch of its payment service from July to September. It’s certainly better to have the technology working out of the gate, but let’s hope that Samsung Pay doesn’t suffer too many major delays.