Samsung Pay transactions hit 40 trillion won

Samsung Pay has acted as the intermediary for a total of 40 trillion won ($36 billion) in transactions, Samsung Electronics announced Tuesday.

As of late last month, 14 million accounts had been opened on the services since it was introduced in 2015.

The transaction volume has been growing near exponentially.

According to the electronics company, transactions totaled 2 trillion won in the first year and 10 trillion won in the second year.

Samsung Pay in 2018 handled 80 percent of Korea’s offline simple payments, according to Financial Supervisory Service (FSS). In terms of online use, it accounted for 25 percent of the total.

The total volume for simple payment services in 2018 stood at more than 80 trillion won.

Simple payment services use password authentication instead of digital certificates. A total of 43 firms are offering these payment services, such as KakaoPay and Naver Pay.

Samsung plans to expand its services to include overseas transfers and transportation cards. It also plans to provide an exchange service in collaboration with Woori Bank.

Users will be able to exchange currencies by signing up for the service on the Samsung Pay application and collecting the exchanged funds at a Woori Bank branch.

Samsung will deal on 15 currencies, including dollars, Japanese yen and euros.

“Apart from the simple payment service, Samsung plans to strengthen our partnership with partners engaged in a diverse range of fields,” said a spokesperson for Samsung. “We will continue to provide convenient and different types of fintech services that can be enjoyed by our customers on a daily basis.”

BY JIN MIN-JI [jin.minji@joongang.co.kr]