BARCELONA, Spain – NFC Times Exclusive Insight: Samsung Electronics has unveiled its Apple Pay rival, which it calls Samsung Pay, a mobile-payments service that, as expected, supports technology from Samsung’s recent acquisition of LoopPay combined with NFC. 

Following the lead from Apple, Samsung Pay will use tokenization supported by the major payment schemes, as well as fingerprint biometrics as the preferred authentication method for consumers. But Samsung aims to differentiate itself from Apple Pay with its proprietary “MST” technology acquired from LoopPay, which it claims will enable acceptance at around 90% of merchant point-of-sale terminals in the U.S., compared with less than 10% for Apple Pay. 

Samsung also announced it had deals with schemes Visa and MasterCard, along with such major issuers as American Express, American Express, Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, and U.S. Bank. A partnership with Synchrony Financial, formerly GE Capital, the largest provider of private-label credit cards in the U.S., indicates Samsung Pay will also support store cards, unlike Apple Pay, at present. The major payment networks and issuers listed as partners by Samsung also support Apple Pay.