Samsung Pay, i.e. Samsung’s flagship payment solution, is growing at a mind-boggling pace, gaining one million new users in the last one-and-half months alone.
What’s the rationale behind such vertical growth?
The increase signs a shift in the payment ecosystem and the rise of digital payments. With their slowly – but steadily – acceptance in the mainstream, there is all of a sudden a new space in the market. But it hasn’t popped up out of the blue. Major firms like Facebook and Amazon both have experimented with the concept of digital payments since Facebook Credits (2011) and Amazon Coins (2013). And if you look closer, the landscape of today will appear even wider.
At a first, shallow glance mobile payments may seem just a game between Apple, Google and Samsung, each with a proprietary platform: Apple Pay, Android Pay – made out of Google Wallet‘s rib, and Samsung Pay. All of them leverage an existing platform, whether it is hardware (in the case of Apple and Samsung) or software (in the case of Google’s Android ecosystem). But you should also consider that both Snapchat and that Facebook supports mobile payment via text messages. Also, think about Square and PayPal. And that’s not even the end of it: actually, the market’s actually much bigger when you start taking into account blockchain-based mobile payments such as Ethereum and Bitcoin. Also, other non-tech giants are entering or already have entered the market of mobile payments: JP Morgan Chase with Chase Paymentech, Walmart with Walmart Pay and Wells Fargo with Wells Fargo Wallet.
The mobile payment sector is inflated right now
These are the words of Sanjay Razdan, Director of Product strategy and Payments at Samsung India: “On September 12 we had announced that we had 1.5 million users of Samsung Pay. Now we have an additional 1 million users in the last one-and-half months. The user growth has been significant”.
Among the 20 nations where Samsung Pay is available, India has become, after just 8 months since the South Korean company launched the service in the region, the third country by number of users after South Korea and Russia.
Behind the reasons for such a growth, the quality-price ratio of Samsung’s mobile phones, among the highest in the smartphone market, may be playing a big role. Samsung’s platform, consisting of its wide portfolio of hardware and software solutions, turns out to be in better shape than Google’s fragmented Android and iPhone’s iOS.
