Samsung Pay comes to USAA Visa cardholders

October 12, 2016

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samsung-pay-vk

Samsung Pay has added another bank to its roster as USAA just announced that Visa credit and debit cardholders can now use the payment service on their compatible Samsung phones.

Join us after the break for the details.

Samsung made a big splash back in 2015 when it announced its own NFC payment system, Samsung Pay, alongside that year's Samsung Galaxy S6 flagship phones. What separated Samsung Pay from similar systems such as Apple Pay and Android Pay (or Google Wallet at the time) was that it wasn't only compatible with NFC readers. Samsung utilizes Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) which allows Samsung Pay to work with the traditional card swipe payment reader. This definitely set Samsung Pay apart from the rest as you could benefit from the convenience and added security of paying with your smartphone without relying on the vendor to have the proper equipment in place.

Samsung Pay is of course only available on the various Samsung Galaxy S6/Edge, Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S7/Edge phones and since its release many banks have added their cards to the service. It should be noted that the press release only mentions the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, so it's unclear at this time if any other Samsung phones will work with USAA cards, even if they are compatible with Samsung Pay as a whole.

Also worth mentioning is that USAA will start supporting Android Pay with its Visa debit cards as this had not been an option.

Source: USAA

Kevin Arnold Author

Kevin has been obsessed with technology ever since the days of playing with commands in MS-DOS. As a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology where he studied a combination of New Media Programming and Photography, Kevin lives in New York City where he works as a photo retoucher. His first "smartphone" was the good old LG Voyager with its slide-out physical keyboard. The first Android device Kevin owned was the now-infamous HTC Thunderbolt, which he still has in a drawer somewhere. Currently rocking both the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X, Kevin has a (un)healthy obsession with phones and has owned more than he can remember. When he's not shopping for a new phone, Kevin enjoys lots of food and wine, video games, astronomy, and the Big Apple.