Discover makes late entry with Samsung Pay

Nearly two years after promising its availability, Discover Financial Services customers can finally use Samsung Pay.

Discover confirmed that cardholders with Samsung handsets may now add their cards and make payments using Samsung Pay.

What’s curious is why the service only became available to customers around the third week of June, according to reports, much later than the timeline Discover initially laid out for Samsung Pay’s availability.

samsung pay MST — An employee demonstrates Samsung Pay using a Samsung Electronics Co. Galaxy S7 smartphone during a media event in Seoul, South Korea, on Thursday, March 10, 2016. Samsung's latest Galaxy S7 smartphones will go on sale on March 11 in its latest attempt to breathe life into its premium line and wrest ascendancy back from Apple Inc. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg

Samsung Pay works at nearly every merchant terminal—including those without Near Field Communication. That capability was viewed as an advantage over NFC-based rivals Apple Pay and Android Pay, particularly in the early stages of mobile payments when fewer U.S. payment terminals had NFC.

Discover rolled out support for Android Pay and Apple Pay in 2015, and in August of that year it said support for Samsung Pay would come in 2016.

Discover and Samsung did not respond to queries about what caused the delay.

Kate Fitzgerald

Senior Editor, Payments

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