The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is known as a breeding ground for the unveiling of new technologies such as cutting edge TVs, virtual reality sets, the lightest and most powerful laptops, smart appliances and big brand updates. With technology dominating the conference, finance tends to have had little to no involvement at the event. However, thanks to the merging of technology and finance that is spawning the fast growing Fintech industry, finance related news such as that from the mobile payment space has been announced at recent CES events.
This trend continues at CES 2016 this week. Alongside their announcements of new laptops and tablets, Samsung also provided an update for their Samsung Pay mobile payment system. Adding to availability in South Korea and the US, the next countries where Samsung Pay will arrive are Australia, Singapore and Brazil. These countries are in addition to China, the UK and Spain which were previously planned for 2016. However, Samsung didn’t provide dates for when the payment system will be available in the new locations.
Competing against products from Apple and Google as well as banks, mobile Payments represent a growing market for Samsung to collect new revenues as they receive a portion of the card fees of each transaction on Samsung Pay. While currently only a small portion of total transactions, payment trends point to mobile becoming a considerable part of the overall market.
Pushing the technology forward is a point of sale terminal upgrade cycle where many merchants are purchasing new hardware to enable mobile, contactless and EMV standard transactions. In addition, convenience is an important factor as single mobile wallets can house multiple cards at once. Also, biometric authentication tools such as fingerprint verification technology can boost security of payments.
