Samsung Pay may support phones from other brands in future

Samsung Pay may be one of the most compelling reasons to pick up one of Samsung’s latest flagship smartphones but the Executive Vice President of Samsung’s Mobile Division, Injong Rhee, has revealed that the company might on day open up its payment service to devices built by other manufacturers.

According to Rhee, Samsung is considering opening up its system to its partners and possibly non-Samsung handsets but currently isn’t working with any other brands, as the company is busy with further development of the platform. So there’s nothing on the horizon any time soon, but the door has been left open to collaboration in the future.

“From the beginning, we’ve considered providing Samsung Pay to our partners. But right now global expansion is happening so quickly for Samsung Pay that we are focusing all our energy on deployment.” – Samsung’s Injong Rhee

What isn’t clear is whether Samsung would allow other companies to use its Magnetic Secure Transmission technology, which allows Samsung Pay to work with a range of existing card readers, or if other partners would have to rely on NFC, offering little benefit over the universal Android Pay system. However, we do know that Samsung is planning to bring its magnetic technology to its lower end smartphones in the near future.

Samsung Pay was only launched in South Korea a couple of months ago and has only just made its début in the US. As of last month, the service has over one million users and has seen transactions worth $88 million pass through it. Samsung has also stated plans to support additional financial institutions, online purchases and gift card payments, and may also offer its own card-less options at some point in the future.

Clearly the company has big plans for Samsung Pay and getting its software onto a wider range of devices could be an important step on the road to becoming a bigger player in the financial industry.