Samsung Kicks Off Samsung Pay Seven-City Tour

Samsung has already made one big move that Apple skipped when it launched Apple Pay: educating consumers about the product by bringing it to big cities and promoting it at events.

And that’s exactly what Samsung is doing through its seven-city tour that will promote Samsung Pay. The cities that will be part of the tour are: Austin, Dallas, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Samsung will take the opportunity at each location to work with local retailers to promote using Samsung Pay on particular items. It will also offer discounts for those items to encourage consumers to use Samsung Pay.

“Where better to showcase the most widely accepted mobile payment service than at merchants and retailers in some of America’s most vibrant and iconic cities,” said Narayanan Murugesan, VP of Strategy and Operations at Samsung. “From Austin to Atlanta, from coffee shops to taco stands, Samsung Pay lets Galaxy owners pay with a wallet that’s already in their hands — on the card terminals retailers already have. It’s simple, safe, and accepted almost anywhere you can swipe or tap your card.”

Samsung’s tour kicks off in Austin with the Austin City Limits Music Festival featuring a special Samsung Pay Block Party today (Oct. 1). The block party will continue through the weekend. Samsung Pay, of course, will be a prominent payment method for attendees to pay with using the newly released mobile payment solution.

Also, to celebrate the launch, festival-goers with compatible cards can use Samsung Pay on their Samsung phone (Galaxy S6, S6 edge, Note5 or S6 edge+) and receive ACL gear at a 50 percent discount at any of the Samsung Pay Stands in the Galaxy Experience and Galaxy Owners Lounge on the festival grounds. Samsung Pay will work on Galaxy S6, S6 edge, Note5 and S6 edge+ devices operating on the AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and U.S. Cellular networks in the United States. 

The rest of the tour includes: Atlanta (Oct. 16-18); New York (Oct. 23-25); Chicago (Oct. 30-Nov. 1); San Francisco (Nov. 6-8) and Los Angeles (Nov. 13-15). 

Samsung Pay comes into the market with the same tokenization features of the other “Pay” players; it is part of MasterCard’s Digital Enablement Services and Visa’s Digital Enablement Program.

But the big difference, of course, is its MST technology, which enables Samsung Pay acceptance at just about every terminal that today accepts any mag stripe or EMV card without merchants having to change anything at their points of sale.

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