Samsung announced Thursday that its mobile payment platform, Samsung Pay, will roll out in the US in September on Samsung's newly announced Galaxy Note 5 and S6 Edge + smartphones.
It'll eventually work with the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge with a software update this fall.
Samsung Pay uses both near-field communication (NFC) and Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) to transmit payment info, which will allow it to be used with almost any credit card reader.
Apple Pay, on the other hand, only uses NFC, which only a relatively small number of payment terminals are equipped to handle.
So far, Samsung has only officially partnered with Visa and MasterCard and a few other banks, but it will add partners over time.
To develop Samsung Pay, Samsung purchased the mobile payments startup LoopPay in February this year. LoopPay makes the hardware technology that enables Samsung Pay to work with regular magnetic credit card readers.
"What’s unique about our technology is that we can get above the threshold of acceptance," LoopPay CEO Will Graylin told Tech Insider in an interview, referring to how easy is it for merchants and users to adopt Samsung Pay.
“We believe that a truly digital and truly mobile wallet without plastic and leather is in our future, and we’re the first company, we believe, that has an opportunity to start driving adoption towards that."
Samsung Pay was originally announced in March when the Samsung Galaxy S6 launched. It was supposed to go live this summer, but Samsung pushed its plans back to coincide the Samsung Pay launch with the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge+.
