Samsung announced that it’s merging its Pay and Pass apps into Samsung Wallet, a single, integrated platform for financial products, official documents, home and car keys, and more. Users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US are the first to have access to the updated service.

Why should we care?
Samsung’s move is a clear attempt to compete with Google’s expanded wallet capabilities—and create more monetizable daily users in the process. "Mobile wallets are a treasure trove of data, harboring the most valuable data needed to open new accounts digitally, data to reduce fraud, data to reduce abandonment rates, data for financial inclusion and ultimately to deliver personalized ads and offers," said Richard Crone, a payments consultant. Samsung saw early success years ago through a strategy that let Samsung phones work with older payments technologies by making its devices legible to magnetic-stripe readers at points of sale. But Samsung is no longer resting on its laurels and is responding to growing pressures: Banks and fintechs are eating up larger parts of the market through their own mobile-wallet offerings, and Apple has entered the ring as well. Without the right financial services, Samsung might lose customers—both financial clients and smartphone users—to Apple and Google, a one-two punch it wouldn’t survive.