In June 2022, Samsung launched the Samsung Wallet app in South Korea, the United States and a few countries in Europe (France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom). At the same time, Samsung launched the long-awaited service which allows Splio Mobile Wallets to handle dynamic Passes (for now limited to boarding passes). That’s one small step for Splio, one giant leap for Mobile Wallets marketing 🚀. In this article, we tried to sum up all you need to know as a marketer about Samsung Wallet.
Context
Samsung Pay has existed for years now. It has been launched as a mobile payment and digital wallet service in 2015 in South Korea and the US, then was rolled out in many countries including Spain (2016), the United Kingdom (2017), France and Italy (2018), Germany (2020), etc.
The Samsung Pay app was mainly used for payments (check eligible payment cards in France), transport tickets (check how it works in France) and also to store all the barcodes a user may need in their daily life (coupons, loyalty & membership cards). But those Passes were static, as Samsung did not offer a service to add Passes from outside the app or to update them.
In 2022, Samsung decided to go further and merged Samsung Pay and Samsung Pass (identification management) into Samsung Wallet. With Samsung Wallet, Samsung users will have a way to centralize their credit cards, boarding passes, tickets, digital keys and IDs, loyalty cards and more in one single app, similarly to Apple Wallet and Google Wallet.
And with the launch of the long-awaited Wallet Service that goes with Samsung Wallet app, Mobile Wallets Marketing will become possible in a scalable way!
Impact for Samsung users
Samsung Wallet is available for Galaxy devices enabled for Samsung Pay, running Android Pie (9) or later versions in the 6 countries concerned by the launch (the rollout should be extended in the future).
- For new Galaxy devices, Samsung Wallet is part of the operating system.
- For existing compatible Galaxy devices, users will be prompted to update and migrate to Samsung Wallet when opening Samsung Pay or Samsung Pass. The migration process should keep all the existing assets in the app.
- For devices that are not compatible with Samsung Wallet, if they had Samsung Pay or Samsung Pass, nothing changes.
Impact for marketers
Why should this be interesting for you?
- Because Mobile Wallets are growing fast. Please read our blog article to understand what is Mobile Wallets marketing, and what is Splio Mobile Wallets.
- Samsung is a major player in the mobile market in Europe.
Splio has been working closely with Samsung on implementing the necessary changes to Splio Mobile Wallets for your brand to engage with Samsung Wallet users and be ready from day 1.
The Wallet Service and Samsung Wallet app upgrade needed to distribute your Passes and update them are rolled out gradually by verticals (and by countries).
If your Pass use cases are eligible to Samsung Wallet, you will be contacted by Splio to move forward with the activation whenever it is soon to be launched.
For now, in Europe, Samsung Wallet and the Wallet API can only handle boarding passes. Tickets handling is expected to be available very soon. Membership (loyalty and subscription) will come later without any official timeline yet. Until then, like previously in Samsung Pay, the membership cards a user can add in Samsung Wallet are still a static “photo” of a barcode (no data updates like points balance and no distribution from outside the app).
Meanwhile, you can watch the Samsung Wallet official announcement, which is part of the Galaxy Unpacked in February 2022.