Samsung and Paypal teaming up for a payment system on the next Gear smartwatch

By Joel Joseph on September 22, 2014

Just a few weeks back, Samsung unveiled its first standalone smartwatch with cellular 3G connectivity, the Samsung Gear S and now we already have reports about the next generation of smartwatches under development by the company which is scheduled to release next year.

This news is not at all surprising given that Samsung has always believed in expanding the range of their devices as soon as possible. And this strategy actually helped the company become the number one smartphone manufacturer in the world.

It looks like the South Korean giant is heading towards the same direction with its smartwatch range. Business Korea reports that Samsung is already working on its next smartwatch, the seventh one in the range which will come with a number of features including one which will make paying much simpler and easier than before.

Samsung is reportedly teaming up with PayPal, one of the most renowned payment companies for this feature which will directly rival Apple Pay on the recently announced Apple Watch.

Although the Cupertino giant announced Apple Watch on September 9^th press event, it won’t be available for purchase until next year. This means, the Apple Pay feature which is going to debut with the new watch will only be available after its launch in 2015.

This gives Samsung around 4-5 months to develop and work on its own payment system.

Both Samsung and PayPal need this new feature to work. Samsung has to come with a feature which will be useful on a wide scale and will attract new customers while PayPal, which is already threatened by small startups worldwide, has to retain its popularity among customers.

The new payment feature will use biometric authentication for login. So, the next smartwatch range will most likely come with a fingerprint sensor, like the recent Galaxy smartphones. This also means that the feature may not work with existing Samsung smartwatches, unless the company figures out a way to use the sensor on its smartphones to complete the authentication.

One Samsung executive said the following to Business Korea, “We are currently developing the smart watch equipped with fingerprint identification technology and relevant solutions through cooperation with PayPal, the world’s most renowned financial transaction service company, as well as Synaptics, a global company specialized in biometric verification. By the earliest, the third generation smart watch to be released early next year will have this new system in which payment is authorized immediately when users identify themselves through biometric sensors such as a fingerprint or login.”