Samsung has been hard at work when it comes to enriching its Galaxy ecosystem. The company is now consolidating a few of its services under a new Samsung Wallet umbrella. The new Wallet service will not only allow users to pay digitally but will be able to store digital IDs and keys.
Samsung’s hallmark e-payment service has, so far, been SamsungPay. However, if you use a Galaxy device, you will undoubtedly realise that a service called Samsung Pass prompts you to save your passwords or, in some cases, pops up when you want to use fingerprint or other biometric authentications. These services are now being united into a single service called Samsung Wallet.
The platform will bring together all password and payment services into a single touch point. In addition, it will also enable users to store digital versions of their identifications in the app. Items like flight tickets, loyalty cards, membership cards and even digital car keys will also fall under the new Samsung Wallet umbrella. To date, cars like the Genesis GV60 and G90 as well as the Hyundai Palisade currently support Samsung Wallet. Korean Air is so far the only airline to support digital boarding passes via Samsung Wallet.
The digital wallet relies on Samsung’s Knox protection. This framework has been so successful at beefing up security on an Android device that Google has baked a few of its features into Android natively. According to Samsung, data is secure and only the user can access sensitive information directly.
Samsung Wallet has launched in seven countries. These countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Germany, Spain and South Korea. There is no word when the service will begin launching in other countries just yet. If Samsung Pay’s development was any indication, we should see the list of supported countries expanding towards the end of the year.
Since the launch of Samsung Wallet on June 17, there were reports that Samsung Pay had stopped working on non-galaxy devices. There were some Samsung Pay executives that noted that the move is intentional and that Samsung Pay will not work on non-galaxy devices. However, it looks like Samsung has reversed course on the issue and fixed the issue via a patch.