Samsung acquires LoopPay mobile payment firm

Samsung Group is in talks to acquire one of the mobile payment firms in the country, LoopPay to compete with the existing Apple Pay. Its been said that the company will integrate the LoopPay in its upcoming smartphones for easy and quick payment processing.

LoopPay, unlike the Google Wallet and Apple Pay, does not uses the NFC mode of transmission to transmit the credit card information from the smartphone to the Point-of-Sale terminal, however, it generates a special magnetic field that is similar to the one that is produced while swiping the card.

LoopPay was first seen on the Kickstarter last year, and it puts a little add-on to the device which uses the company’s Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) to to transmit the magnetic fields for the payment processing. It is almost similar as swiping a card on the terminal. LoopPay’s technology allows the vendor to use the existing payment terminals for the mobile payments. Unlike, NFC payment systems, it doesn’t requires any special hardware amendments and works on the traditional PoS. 

“NFC is currently only available in less than 10 percent of U.S. retailers despite NFC’s mobile launch almost a decade ago,” a Samsung spokeswoman said via email. “MST solves the merchant acceptance issue that has prevented other mobile wallet solutions from reaching mass adoption.”

In addition to it, JK Shin, head of Samsung’s mobile division said, “Our goal has always been to build the smartest, most secure, user-friendly mobile wallet experience, and we are delighted to welcome LoopPay to take us closer to this goal.”

The acquisition will apparently put the South Korean smartphone giant ahead of all in the mobile payments system. Currently one of the major competitor is the payment system from its closest rival Apple Inc. Cupertino giant last year introduced a new payment system called Apple Pay.