Samsung Has Discontinued Samsung Pay Mobile Payment Service On Budget Phones

Samsung Electronics has discontinued its Samsung Pay service on its budget-friendly smartphones. The South Korean giant has confirmed that it stopped embedding the mobile payment tool in devices that do not belong to its top-tier offerings.

Industry watchers disclosed to Yonhap over the weekend that Samsung is no longer loading Samsung Pay on its budget smartphones to cut costs in maintaining the service. The company expects to save a lot by excluding the tool from its mid-tier handsets.

“As it costs roughly 5,000 won per device to apply Samsung Pay, (the company) is apparently seeking to cut production costs by excluding the feature,” one industry watcher explained.

The move is also Samsung’s response to the low usage of the service among non-flagship devices. The tech giant admits that the feature has become less popular among teens and senior users who comprise the target market of its budget phones.

Samsung Pay is Samsung’s own mobile payment platform that was launched in 2015 in response to Apple’s Apple Pay service. It works on traditional credit card machines that are running magnetic secure transmission (MST) technology and it also supports near field communication (NFC) technology.

Basically, Samsung Pay serves as a replacement to credit cards and debit cards and works by processing payments at tap-to-pay terminals. From the app, users get to select the card they want to pay with. They then need to verify their transaction using the fingerprint reader, iris scanner or PIN. Once the payment is made, a notification is sent to the user which is automatically saved in the app, as per CNET.

Samsung mainly offers the service through its flagship devices, including the Galaxy S6, Note 5, S7, S8 and S9 series. But last year, the company choose to embed the tool in the Galaxy J5 and J7 smartphones that are budget-friendly compared to the high-end phones.

This 2018, Samsung will only offer Samsung Pay on its premium handsets — flagship phones and models with prices higher than 700,000 won or US$626. Thus far, it is only made available to the Galaxy S9, Galaxy S9 Plus and Galaxy A8. Fans can expect the upcoming Note 9 to have the tool as well.

While Samsung is diminishing the handsets that will come equipped with Samsung Pay, its neighboring rival, LG Electronics, appears to be expanding the reach of its LG Pay mobile payment platform. LG has applied its service on seven of the eight smartphones it released so far this 2018.