Samsung Pay now works with loyalty cards in the US
You can load all of your membership cards right into the mobile payment service on your Galaxy phone. — by , Shara Tibken — Got a ton of pesky loyalty cards you can never find when you need them? Samsung's got you covered.
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung Pay arrived in the US in September 2015 as a payments-only service locked to 2015 Galaxy flagships and a short list of issuers — Bank of America, Citi, Amex, U.S. Bank — per the US launch coverage. Adding loyalty cards is the first sign Samsung wants the app to hold more than credit cards.
It also fits the expansion path Samsung had already telegraphed: by December 2015 it was planning online payments and a move down to lower-priced phones (Reuters reported those plans). Loyalty cards widen the app's daily-use surface beyond checkout, which matters for a service whose reach is capped by the Galaxy install base.
First-order effects
- US Galaxy owners can consolidate membership cards into Samsung Pay, giving the app a reason to be opened outside payment moments and deepening lock-in to Samsung hardware.
- Merchants' loyalty programs gain a digital distribution channel through Samsung's device base without building their own apps.
Second-order effects
- A wallet holding loyalty cards is the natural substrate for the location-based coupons and in-app/online purchases Samsung announced later that year (the October 2016 feature roadmap) — stored cards make targeted offers actionable at the point of sale.
- Every card loaded raises switching costs away from Galaxy phones, pressuring rival phone makers to match wallet breadth rather than just tap-to-pay parity.
Third-order effects
- The endpoint of this arc is visible in the corpus: by 2022 Samsung merged Pay and Pass into a single Wallet holding IDs, keys, boarding passes, and crypto (the Wallet merger) — the loyalty-card step was an early rung toward the phone becoming the user's default credential store.
- If the pattern holds, wallet functionality becomes a platform differentiator tied to handset choice, pulling regulators and card networks into questions about who controls digital identity and credentials on mobile.
The trend: Phone makers are converting payment apps into full wallets — payments first, then loyalty, credentials, and keys — because every stored card binds the user tighter to the handset.