Samsung and MasterCard to launch Apple Pay competitor in Europe

30 million locations

The service should be available in over 30 million locations worldwide, which makes it a lot more accessible than many other payment services. The reason for this widespread coverage is that Samsung not only uses NFC (Near Field Communication), the most-used technology among contact-free payment services, but also Magnetic Secure Transmission.

That technology enables a smartphone to generate a magnetic field, mimicking a card’s magnet strip. That way, Samsung Pay is compatible with not only the newest but also older payment terminals. To guarantee safe transfers, the data is only stored on the smartphone, while a transaction triggers the creation of a token that is sent to the terminal.

Samsung Pay, announced in March 2015, was supposed to launch alongside the Samsung Galaxy S6, but has been postponed ever since. The goal is to launch the service in the United States and Korea over the summer, while European MasterCard users will have to wait for the next phase.