What is Samsung Pay?

Samsung Pay is the mobile wallet built into Samsung Galaxy phones and Galaxy Watches. It tokenises the customer's card — storing a Device Account Number on the device rather than the real card number — and pays at NFC contactless terminals when the user authenticates with a fingerprint or PIN. Until 2021 it had a unique trick called Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST), which let it work at older swipe-only terminals by emulating a magnetic stripe, but Samsung dropped MST from the Galaxy S21 onwards. Today it functions much like Apple Pay or Google Pay, with the obvious limitation that it only runs on Samsung hardware.

Samsung Pay sits alongside Apple Pay and Google Pay as one of the three big phone wallets, and the way it handles card data is broadly the same: the real PAN never leaves the issuer's vault. What it stores on the device is a token — Samsung calls it a Device Account Number — paired with a one-time cryptogram generated for each tap. If the phone is lost or the token is intercepted, the real card number isn't exposed, which is the whole point of tokenization.

How a Samsung Pay payment actually works

The user adds a card by typing it in or scanning it. Samsung doesn't store that PAN — it sends it to the card scheme (Visa, Mastercard, Amex), which returns a Device Account Number bound to that specific phone. From then on, the phone holds the token, not the card. At checkout the user holds the phone near the terminal, authenticates with a fingerprint (older devices supported iris too), and the phone sends the token plus a fresh cryptogram over NFC. The acquirer routes it to the scheme, the scheme detokenises, the issuer authorises, and you're done.

Because the user authenticates on their own device with biometrics, the payment satisfies Strong Customer Authentication under PSD2 — possession (the phone) plus inherence (the fingerprint). That's why most contactless caps don't apply when paying with Samsung Pay.

What happened to MST?

Samsung Pay's original headline feature was Magnetic Secure Transmission. The phone could generate a magnetic field strong enough to fool a card reader's mag-stripe head into thinking a real card had been swiped. It was clever, and for a few years it gave Samsung Pay genuine reach in markets where contactless terminals were thin on the ground.

Then NFC took over. The Galaxy S21, launched in 2021, was the first flagship without an MST coil. Every Samsung phone since has been NFC-only. If you've still got a Galaxy S10 or S20 in a drawer, it'll still do the magnetic-stripe trick — but that's a curiosity now, not a strategy.

Where Samsung Pay fits in the wallet pecking order

Apple Pay dominates because iPhones dominate. Google Pay is the default on most non-Samsung Android phones. Samsung Pay's reach is bounded by Samsung's own market share — sizeable in Korea, India, and parts of Europe, smaller in the US, almost nothing on non-Samsung Android handsets. For merchants that accept contactless, this doesn't really matter: the terminal accepts NFC, and whichever wallet the customer is holding, the flow is the same.

One quirk worth knowing: in most markets Samsung doesn't take an issuer fee for Samsung Pay transactions. Apple Pay does. That's why some banks have historically pushed Samsung Pay over Apple Pay in their marketing — it's cheaper for them to support.

Samsung Pay versus the others, in one paragraph

Functionally, the three big wallets now look almost identical at the terminal. They all tokenise. They all use NFC. They all authenticate biometrically and satisfy SCA. The differences are platform lock-in (Samsung Pay only works on Galaxy devices), the bank's economics (no issuer fee on Samsung Pay in most markets), and historical features that no longer apply (MST is gone). If you're a merchant deciding what to support, the answer is "all of them, and you don't actually have to do anything different — your contactless terminal already does".

Where Samsung Pay doesn't reach

Samsung Pay is great for in-person contactless. It's not the answer for telephone payments. If a customer rings your contact centre to pay, they need to read a card number out — and no NFC wallet helps with that. That's where DTMF masking and Pause and Resume come in: the customer keys their card number into the phone keypad, the digits are intercepted before they hit your agent or your call recording, and the PCI scope of the call collapses to nearly nothing.