Samsung Pay celebrates 1st birthday with support for coupons, $100K in prizes

By Williams Pelegrin September 28, 2016

samsung pay first us birthday mobile payment

Samsung Pay will celebrate its first anniversary in the United States on Wednesday, and the company will celebrate the milestone with new features and a contest.

Starting with updates, Samsung Pay now supports over 500 banks and credit unions across the U.S., with over 80 percent of all debit and credit cards now covered by the mobile payment service. Furthermore, Samsung Pay’s latest update allows users to pay with their Galaxy Note 7’s (that have hopefully been exchanged) using the phone’s iris scanner.

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However, Samsung also took the one-year anniversary as an avenue to announce new features for its mobile payment service, starting with an in-app coupon service. The South Korean giant teamed up with Quotient Technology, the artist formerly known as Coupons.com Inc., to allow Samsung Pay users to search, save, and redeem coupons within the app. The coupons are linked with a membership account, which allows the savings to be reflected when checking out.

In addition to the in-app coupon service, Samsung Pay’s recent update now supports gift cards from “hundreds of the nation’s largest retailers,” as well as the ability for users to earn rewards through merchants’ membership programs through the service. Finally, Samsung Pay now works in conjunction with the cloud to restore any membership, gift, and Samsung Rewards cards when signing into a new device.

As for actual celebrations, Samsung will offer over $100,000 in prizes, with 365 people receiving the company’s Gear S2 smartwatch free of charge. To enter the contest, folks will need to tweet an emoji birthday message with the hashtags #SamsungPay and #sweepstakes. The contest is a one-day affair, so entrants have from midnight to 11:59 p.m. on September 28 to submit their entries.

Samsung Pay has had an impressive first year, with the service having handled over 100 million transactions as of August. Even though Samsung Pay still lags behind Apple Pay — Apple’s service accounts for around 75 percent of mobile payments — it continues to make a dent in the market, even in the face of Android Pay, which supports more devices than Samsung Pay.

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