Samsung Pay, announced at MWC 2015 this year alongside the new Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge, has been set back by at least a few months to September 2015 for the US and Korean markets. The service had originally been slated for a July launch, but in an investor call today a Samsung executive indicated that the service would more likely come in September.
Sadly, this doesn’t bode too well for Australia, as we’re not likely to see the service here for some time after a successful US roll-out. In all likelihood, we may never see it here at all, but at least it hasn’t been ruled out just yet. The service could be quite cool, if/when it launches, but it is already being overshadowed by the announcement of the device-agnostic Android Pay, which will support most newer Samsung phones, as well as most other brands’ Android handsets as well.
Android Pay, launched at Google I/O just a week ago, promises an awful lot, and Google is fairly sure it’ll be available for KitKat devices and above from around the same time — September onwards. Android Pay probably will make it to Australia, but it might not be as quick, what with our different regulatory environment. The good news, though, is that Android Pay uses the same tokenisation technology used by existing NFC payment apps such as CommBank, so there’s one less hurdle to jump.
