Bloomberg recently reported that Samsung Pay has less than half the users of Apple Pay. 5 million versus 12 million. That puts it on the same level with Android Pay, which is frankly impressive in its own right. However, the chart below does not tell the whole story.

Apple Pay has so many more users because they had a year-long head start over its two rivals. If we consider how long they were in the market, Samsung Pay and Android Pay signed up an average of a million users per month. Apple Pay, on the other hand, averaged 706,000 new users per month.

That means, both Android Pay and Samsung Pay are growing 42% faster than Apple Pay.

 

Why Samsung Pay Did So Well

Samsung Pay only worked with the 5 Samsung Galaxy devices during the survey (the newly announced Galaxy S7 and S7 edge do not count). Yet, they managed to sign up as many users as Android Pay, and sign new users 42% faster than Apple Pay.

That is likely due to the fact that Samsung Pay is easier to implement than both Apple Pay and Android Pay. Samsung Pay works with the old magnetic stripe terminals as well as the newer NFC payment terminals. Apple Pay and Android Pay, on the other hand, only works with NFC payment terminals.

In other words, Samsung Pay works with any credit card terminal anywhere, while Apple Pay and Android Pay will only work at retailers that have upgraded to the new NFC terminals.

 

Samsung Pay Demonstration

At the recently-held Samsung Forum 2016, we were given an exclusive briefing and demonstration of Samsung Pay. Check out just how easy it is to pay using Samsung Pay. This is why Samsung will have an easier time driving its adoption over their two rivals.

The only downside with Samsung Pay is that it is limited to Samsung’s top-of-the-line Galaxy smartphones. If Samsung adds support for their other smartphones with NFC chips, their adoption would probably be much higher. Here are the 7 Samsung Galaxy smartphones that support Samsung Pay :

• [adrotate banner=”4″]Samsung Galaxy S7 edge
• Samsung Galaxy S7
• Samsung Galaxy Note5
• Samsung Galaxy S6 edge+
• Samsung Galaxy S6 edge
• Samsung Galaxy S6 Active
• Samsung Galaxy S6

In H2 of this year, consumers in Australia, Brazil, Spain, Singapore and the United Kingdom will be able to try out Samsung Pay on their Samsung Galaxy smartphones.

 

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