Market research firm Aite Group said that Apple Pay, which made its debut in October last year, is currently accounting for merely 1 percent of retail payments in the United States. Phoenix Marketing International added that the rate of increase in the number of its users is slowing down, increasing by just three percentage points to 14 percent of credit card-using American households between February and September.
Meanwhile, Samsung Pay is enjoying huge popularity these days although it has been in the market for only a couple of months. In Korea, the number of subscribers has already topped one million, and the number of payments per day and the accumulated amount of the payments have exceeded 100,000 won (US$86.35) and 100 billion won (US$86 million), respectively.
“It has been found that American consumers who use the Samsung Pay tend to opt to use it repeatedly,” Samsung Electronics explained, adding, “75 percent of the Samsung Pay-based payments in the United States have been based on MST or magnetic security transmissions, proving that our payment application supporting MST and NFC at the same time is competitive enough.”
Still, experts point out that more time will be taken to find out who the winner will be in the end, because Apple is making various investments for the popularization of Apple Pay. Bloomberg recently said that stores will adopt the new payment system at a more rapid pace once mobile payments become the mainstream, and the growth of Apple Pay is likely to be accelerated after the passage of three to five years.