Rather than speculate what LG will call its mobile payment service that’s it has purportedly been working on for over a year, the better question to ask might be whether LG would benefit from Magnet Secure Transmission (MST) rather than NFC like Apple Pay and Android Pay?
The LG G6 may finally feature the ability to make purchases with new service
It seems like little more than a decade ago; you had ATM cards and Western Union to get cash or send money elsewhere electronically. Sure, Moneygram was also around to try to compete with Western Union and largely did well owing to WU’s astronomical fees associated with sending money domestically or to another country. Then along came PayPal to change the game up a bit and has since been joined by Facebook and countless others for Internet remittances. Now, we’ve taken an even larger step forward with increasing numbers of people insisting on being able to pay from their smartphones at cash registers all over the country and the world.
Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Samsung Pay all offer millions of users the opportunity to safely and securely pay for things from their phone in a flash. Apple Pay remains the leader in this area with software that boasts some features and was quickly adopted by tens of thousands of merchants. As considerably more people in the world use smartphones running Android regardless of the manufacturer, and it fell to Google to work out a way for these people to enjoy the same luxuries enjoyed by iOS users with Apple Pay. Consequently, Google has nearly caught up to Apple pay with their solution that uses NFC technology and only NFC technology.
Samsung, with its popularity and lead in smartphone manufacturing and branding, went a different route with its own Samsung Pay that features Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) for payments and rumor has it that LG, while late to jump into mobile payments, is also looking at MST technology.
There is little question that more and more retailers are installing NFC terminals to accommodate both Apple Pay and Android Pay, Samsung Pay and MST allows payment on any machine that has a traditional card reader where users swipe their cars taking the financial burden off smaller retailers to update or add an NFC reader.
Rumors have long suggested that LG is working on its payment service in-house so it can avoid licensing fees with Samsung or possible patent infringement lawsuits and that the LG G6 will be the first to utilize the new software/hardware bundle.
While LG was reported to have been working with “white card” technology a year or two ago the company seems to have abandoned that path as the technology kind of petered out in its infancy with the big boys going with NFC or MST payment methods.
Again, we have no idea what LG will call the service, but LG Pay would certainly be the easy guess but its marketing department will certainly have something to say on the matter and likely bandying about different names in focus groups ahead of the launch of both the payment service as well as the release of the LG G6. Again, it’s not certain that the LG G6 will offer this option, but it’s a pretty safe bet and will wait for LG’s announcement.
