Samsung in talks with mobile payments startup LoopPay to launch Apple Pay rival in 2015
Samsung in Talks to Launch Apple Pay Competitor — Samsung has discussed a deal with a payments startup that would help the smartphone maker unveil a wireless mobile payments system in 2015 to rival Apple, according to multiple sources.
Context & Ripple Effects
In late 2014 Apple Pay had the contactless payments market to itself on phones, and Samsung — the largest Android vendor — had no answer. This report of talks with LoopPay was the first signal of how Samsung would close that gap: not building a wallet from scratch but acquiring one. The talks became real two months later when Samsung agreed to buy LoopPay outright, and Re/code later reported the price at around $250 million.
What makes this worth tracking is where the arc ended up: Samsung Pay launched, both Apple and Samsung signed separate agreements with China's UnionPay, and by 2020 Samsung extended from tap-to-pay into issuing its own debit card with fintech partner SoFi — payments went from defensive feature to a business line.
First-order effects
- Samsung gains a working wireless-payments stack and a 2015 launch timeline against Apple Pay, ending Apple's head start on flagship phones.
- LoopPay shifts from independent startup courting device makers to Samsung's in-house payments technology, with its team and patents folded into the acquirer.
Second-order effects
- Apple's payments lead stops being structural: with Samsung Pay on comparable hardware, banks and merchants can negotiate with two phone makers instead of one, pressuring terms on both sides.
- The UnionPay deals that followed show the competitive frame going global — each vendor racing to lock up national card networks before the other does.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, smartphone vendors use payments as the wedge into full financial services — wallets first, then cards, then lending partnerships — turning handset margins into recurring finance revenue.
- Payments technology becomes an acquisition target class rather than a build-it-yourself project for consumer electronics firms, since the terminal-compatibility problem favors buying proven rails.
The trend: Smartphone makers are converting mobile wallets into full financial-services platforms, with Samsung's LoopPay deal the template move that started the race.