✅ Support for Samsung Pay

From my understanding there is no Google Pay on Samsung devices. It’s intentionally disabled.

:man_facepalming:t3::roll_eyes: Samsung!

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Samsung doesn’t cripple Google Pay in any way at all, Google Pay is exactly the same on a Samsung phone as on any other phone.

I honestly think this is one area that Starling has it very very right. Everyone should be doing what they’re doing, especially if they’re calling themselves a challenger.

Monzo should be supporting every NFC payment solution.

As they all use the same basic setup, surely if you support one then it’s pretty simple to support them all. I imagine Samsung, Fitbit and Garmin would also do most of the legwork as they’re trying to catch up big time with Google and Apple.

They’d snap your hand off of you approached them as a bank and said you wanted to support their system. Surely?

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I’m sure this has been discussed before, but as I understand it Starling can reuse all the heavy lifting already done by their payment processor (GPS). This means the accreditation from the *pays is very light.

Monzo, on the other hand, has built their own payment processing engine from the ground up. This means that accreditation is more weighty and that they have to do more technical integration.

Essentially (and rightly or wrongly depending on your perspective) Monzo considers this effort best spent elsewhere.

(This isn’t based on any inside information, btw, so it might not be correct, but it’s a good hypothesis, I think).

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As Patrick said, they absolutely don’t and can’t remove Google Pay.
Although if they did, there would be more incentive for Monzo to implement Samsung Pay because Samsung has massive market share in the Android world.
But also there would have been enormous incentive for me personally not to have bought a Samsung if they’d have done any nonsense like this, and stopped me from desamsunging it.

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As of right now there’s no plans to add it. It is a significant amount of work for something that will have quite minimal takeup.

Last time I looked, our userbase remains around 70% iOS and 30% Android.

Of that 30%… I haven’t seen detailed device stats but I know that we have a significant amount of Nexus, Pixel and OnePlus users. Once you remove them, and all other OEMs, and Samsung devices that don’t support Samsung Pay…Like I said, it’s a small figure. Even smaller when you also remove the Samsung users that are perfectly happy to use Google Pay.

I’m not saying we’ll never do it - but the reality is that we need to devote engineering resources to projects that will make great improvements to the UX for a large part of our userbase.

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Thank you for the detailed explanation.

This is one of the things that concerns me about Monzo. This explanation for why features aren’t implemented come up quite often. Surely as a challenger bank you need to offer more than the competition?

I’ve only recently been made aware of the benefits of Samsung pay and it certainly would be a nice to have especially not having to unlock my phone for the underground. I’m also looking at getting a smart watch soon and unless I make the switch to Apple, I’m not going to be able to take full advantage of the smart watch with Monzo.

Stats are all well and good but there is always another way these can be interpreted. If you actively not offering features that appeal to to these users then you won’t get them e.g. I’m aware of several Android users that use Starling instead of Monzo because they are under the belief that the Mozo Android app isn’t very good which at least may of been the case previously. I’m also aware of someone that has recently switched to Starling because they wanted to be able to use their Samsung Pay on their watch.

They may seem like small features but with so much competition it can be the feature that sways a user from going with one bank or another.

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I suppose it’s always interesting to think how many potential customers could join but haven’t becuase this feature is missing. But I guess the user base of it is still relatively small in the grand scheme of things.

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Precisely

To place hard evidence behind this point I have been with Monzo for 18+ months, yesterday I received my Starling card which I opened for two reasons:

  1. Samsung Pay
  2. Interest Rate
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Which features on the road map should they delay to implement this?

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IBANs, or maybe they have already :joy:

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That’s not true - we support all Wear OS (Android Wear) devices that have an NFC chip.

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They shouldn’t have to. It would be nice to say that there should be the staff in place to develop these features. However even a timeline for these to be implemented would be acceptable. I think acceptance that the way people pay for things is changing and to have a bank works with all the technology we use rather than having to choose technology based on what the bank accepts is what Monzo should be aiming for.

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That’s fair but in my view the only two devices I would go for is the Apple watch or the new Samsung Galaxy watch. I haven’t seen anything else that appeals to me personally.

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They have job openings for new engineers, designers, project managers, the lot. If they could roll stuff out quicker I almost bet they would.

PS if you know anyone suitable tell them to apply :slight_smile:

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Mate I never knew there was another similar bank…that also offers Samsung pay. Thanks!

Quick search shows Samsung is second to Apple in the UK. So I’m baffled why making the card compatible with Samsung pay has been put in the back seat.

A new galaxy watch and phone was announced. You’re going to get a lot of people wondering if Monzo is compatible with a feature of their new shiny device.

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We certainly are, the Galaxy Note 9 works with Google Pay :sunglasses:

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I always hear how Samsung (and Android in general) is always at the top of the market share and yet all I see going around London are iPhones. I’m not completely contradicting your argument but it definitely doesn’t sound right for Monzo’s market share, otherwise you’d probably have Samsung Pay already.

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I’ve never had a samsung phone so I don’t really understand why they need their own payment system and why they don’t use Google Pay as default?

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