NFC Times Exclusive – Besides touting its much larger base of acceptance points, Samsung Electronics appears to be emphasizing what it says is a more “agnostic” approach to its technology for its forthcoming Samsung Pay platform, as compared with rival Apple Pay.  

Samsung says it will be more flexible in the configuration of the NFC technology that banks and other “partners” can use, as compared with Apple, which is known for its rigid approach to its Apple Pay architecture and tight control over its ecosystem. 

“What Samsung is doing that is utterly different from our competitors is that we are trying to be agnostic to a lot of different technologies or networks or whatever comes in the middle of it to enable the mobile payments,” said Thomas Ko, co-general manager for Samsung Pay and, until recently, a leader of Citi’s mobile-banking team in the U.S. “So what that means is we’re going to be open to HCE (host-card emulation). We’re going to be open to eSE (embedded secure elements). We’re going to be open to the TEE (trusted execution environment). We’re going to use all those different components that are currently being used in the market for us to be able to enable the mobile payments in various different formats.”