Samsung Is Going Head-to-Head With Apple Pay

Samsung might be losing its title as the world’s largest smartphone maker to Apple, but the company isn’t going down without a fight.

The South Korean company unveiled Samsung Pay—the company’s answer to Apple’s mobile payments system, Apple Pay—at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday. Samsung Pay will be “compatible with more locations than any competing offering in a single application,” and protected by Samsung KNOX (Samsung’s mobile enterprise security systems), fingerprint scanning and advanced tokenization, the company said.

Samsung Pay’s high compatibility is made possible by its use of magnetic secure transmission (MST), a technology that allows Samsung Pay to work with even older credit card readers. So far only Samsung uses the MST technology, thanks to its acquisition of the mobile payments startup LoopPay last month. Like Apple Pay, Samsung will also employ near-field communication (NFC), which allows contactless payments at pay terminals.

Samsung Pay will launch on the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 Edge in the U.S. during the second half of 2015.

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