NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Three years after its launch in South Korea, consumer take-up of Samsung Pay remains lackluster, despite the company’s efforts to hype up its newly released figures.
The mobile wallet, which Samsung launched in South Korea in 2015, has since expanded to a total of 24 markets worldwide, where it has handled 1.3 billion transactions over the past three years, Samsung said in announcing the three-year anniversary of its launch of Samsung Pay this week. That includes online Samsung Pay transactions, which are available in 15 markets.
But the total amount of global Samsung Pay transactions over three years is in the same ballpark as Apple’s recently disclosed figure of 1 billion transactions for the second quarter of 2018 alone for Apple Pay. And Apple’s payments service is itself underperforming. Despite being the leading mobile payments service outside China, Apple Pay accounts for fewer than 1% of transactions with Visa-branded cards or credentials, and likely for a similar percentage of MasterCard-branded transactions.