The title says it all: Without MST support, there is simply no reason to use Samsung Pay. Last year, Samsung effectively stripped Samsung Pay of its most attractive features, but its saving grace was MST – the technology that allowed Samsung phones to imitate a magnetic credit card strip, making them compatible with legacy payment terminals. . But Samsung’s latest smartphones, the Galaxy S21 series, debuted without MST this year – and all that remains of Samsung Pay is a bloated, ad-infested app that compares poorly to Google Pay.
Longtime users of Samsung Pay will remember that Samsung once offered a very respectable rewards program as part of the payment platform. Whenever you make a purchase with Samsung Pay, Samsung will give you reward points that you can invest in different gift cards, raffles or even when purchasing products and special discounts. But at the end of last year, Samsung removed the ability to earn reward points through Samsung Pay. Now, you can only earn these points on purchases or referrals from Samsung, ending one of the few monetary benefits of Samsung Pay. With the end of the MST, this is one of the few practical benefits that disappear.
Samsung Pay has some features that are still interesting, like Samsung Money: a Samsung brand SoFi bank account and a debit card. This can be useful for Samsung owners who want easy access to a bank account directly from the Pay app, but it is by no means a highly competitive online banking offering in the broader world of such things. Samsung offers an “employee discount” for anyone using Samsung Money to buy Samsung products, but it is the same discount you can get as a student (5%), which Samsung notably does not require verification to claim.
Samsung Pay also has a refund program, but I didn’t find it reliable. There were several cases where I made a qualifying purchase, but Samsung Pay did not issue me a discount. In addition, Samsung Pay’s online payment platform is simply not supported or used primarily, at least here in the U.S. I still haven’t found a site that supports Samsung Pay, and this also applies to personal payments from Samsung Pay. I only used Samsung Pay as a way to send or receive money once, because basically nobody else uses it.
I was able to withstand Samsung Pay’s lost features, ads and general unreliability because being able to use it anywhere more than made up for it. Many small businesses in my area still use outdated payment systems that do not support NFC, and I was able to use MST, which was very convenient. But now that I’ve switched to the Galaxy S21, that dream of a fully digital wallet is not only gone, but its memory has been tarnished by the app and the below-average experience that Samsung has left for customers to deal with.
And what will replace it? Unsurprisingly, for me, it’s the new Google Pay, which has all the same cashback features, NFC payments, person-to-person payments and, soon, a debit card and a bank account with a Google Plex account. Google Pay even allows you to link credit cards and bank accounts to view balances and accounts receivable. All with a better UI, no ads and a better touch-to-pay experience (Google Pay doesn’t require interaction to activate). In addition, web and application support for Google Pay really exists, with direct integration across many applications and websites. You can even order food, pay for gas or get parking on the app itself. It is just a more useful and widely accepted platform.
Without the MST, Samsung Pay is really just a more bloated, less useful and, frankly, outdated Google Pay. I say this as someone who was a big supporter of Samsung Pay, going so far as to only drive Samsung phones daily for a few years because of this. I could ignore its many shortcomings, as long as MST support remained. But without it? Samsung Pay makes as much sense to use in 2021 as Google Hangouts.