- Samsung this week announced its plan to introduce a new debit card.
- The company’s new and “innovative” debit card will launch this summer but Samsung didn’t provide us with additional details.
- Visit BGR’s homepage for more stories.
By now, we’re pretty accustomed to seeing Samsung draw inspiration from Apple’s product line and outright steal some of the company’s more well-known iPhone features. In fact, Samsung’s penchant for looking to Apple for guidance runs so deep that they’ve even copied the icon Apple uses for Face ID. This, of course, shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who closely followed Apple and Samsung’s blockbuster patent battle a few years ago. If you recall, the lawsuit saw the release of an internal 132-page Samsung document which laid out in specific detail how to blatantly copy some of the iPhone’s more innovative software features.
Flash forward to 2020 and Samsung’s still up to its old tricks. Late this week, Samsung announced a new plan to roll out an “innovative” debit card. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but this all sounds vaguely familiar to something Apple unveiled in March of last year.
Needless to say, tech companies across the board routinely steal ideas and features from rivals these days. As a prime example, it’s no secret that Apple wasn’t the first smartphone manufacturer to introduce a Night mode camera feature. Of course, some companies lead more than they follow while others follow far more often than they lead, and no one would argue which camp Samsung is in.
With that out of the way, Samsung announced its new debit card initiative via a blog post on Thursday:
In 2020, Samsung Pay will be expanding our service from being a rewarding way to shop and pay, to also being a rewarding way to manage money. Over the past year we have been busy developing a mobile-first money management platform. Our vision is to help consumers better manage their money so that they can achieve their dreams and goals. Now more than ever, mobile financial services and money management tools will play an even bigger role in our daily lives while also opening up new possibilities.
As a first step to this broader vision, this summer Samsung in partnership with SoFi will introduce a new Samsung Pay experience with an innovative debit card backed by a cash management account. We are excited to share more details in the coming weeks.
So what will Samsung’s new debit card bring to the table? How might it differentiate itself from a slew of other card offerings currently available? Well, we’re not exactly sure as Samsung didn’t really provide much in the way of detail.
It’s interesting to see Samsung make more of a push in the financial space because we still haven’t heard any concrete details about how the Apple Card has been doing in the marketplace. While Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon championed Apple’s credit card as the “most successful credit-card launch ever,” it’s hard to make sense of it without more data.
On a somewhat related note, it’s worth reminding readers that in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Apple is letting customers defer monthly payments without accruing additional interest.
