Payments Ecosystem

Samsung Pay launches in Korea on Aug 20; Us Sep 28 and UK, Spain and China to follow suit. Galaxy S6 and edge phones along with Note5 to support Samsung Pay. 

Four key developments happening as we come to the end of 2015 summer: 

• Interesting to see Android phone manufactured by Samsung (S6 and others) with NFC capability will allow the user to choose between Samsung Pay or Android Pay for NFC? 
• Customer choice will become an increasing area of focus in coming year as Paypal, Android, Samsung offer NFC payment services across Samsung NFC phone. Contactless acceptance is increasing at a rapid pace and it will drive usage in both Apple Pay and NON-APPLE Pay devices. 
• Android Pay can likely win in the space of non-Apple Pay devices with an offering that supports mobile buy buttons from search and building a good loyalty/coupon aggregator application which is universal across customer preferred merchants.
• MCX / CurrentC - I feel more confident that the plug on this capability before Q1/2016 ends. It might end up being an option to choose across payments forms including the 'Pays' of Apple, Android, Samsung, Paypal Or might just be retained for creating a cross-merchant loyalty application, similar to Plenti however for use across the MCX universe of merchants. 

Forbes author Gene survey indicates 87% of small merchants are not accept Apple Pay and the key driver being lack of incentives for adoption. Upcoming loyalty application will not bring adoption with the SME's that are seeking low cost payment forms. Will Apple Pay be a experience for the high-end smart-phone user at large merchant locations only?