Samsung Pay

Just in time for its U.S. launch next week, Samsung Electronics Co. said that its new mobile payment service has processed more than $30 million worth of transactions in its first month in South Korea, a level of market adoption that the company said was “beyond our expectations.”

The service, Samsung Pay, competes directly with Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay and offerings from Google Inc. and a group of major U.S. retailers. Unlike those rivals, however, Samsung’s technology is designed to work even with credit card readers that haven’t yet adopted next-generation near-field communication, or NFC, technology.

That is to say, Samsung Pay can, in theory, work in far more situations than Apple Pay or any of its rivals — especially since American retailers have been slow to adopt the next-generation technology that Apple Pay relies on. The question, then, for Samsung, was whether or not it could convince consumers to use its service.

Mobile payment solutions have been long anticipated by technology watchers, but haven’t yet been adopted en masse by U.S. consumers, who have stuck largely to swiping their traditional credit and debit cards at legacy magnetic stripe card readers.

Samsung said in its statement that it has processed more than 1.5 million total transactions so far, with about 10% of consumers who have used Samsung Pay using it every day.