Money changes hands — so it goes with capitalism. But there are plenty of ways to make that happen. Square, for example, makes smartphone and tablet peripherals for businesses to take payments from magstripe cards. Other people will use the emoji-ridden Venmo service from PayPal for entirely digital transactions. Samsung, however, is testing out a way to conduct in-person payments via phone or card using its phones and it's calling this new system SoftPOS.

SoftPOS, or "software point of sales," was created in collaboration between Samsung, payments processor Fiserv, and Visa to allow smartphones with NFC to take payments from any NFC-capable medium including phones, traditional bank-issued cards, watches, and key fobs. Fiserv provides the app interface while Samsung Knox provides hardware- and software-based security for the transactions — presumably through the use of a Samsung Galaxy phone.

The service, which is targeted as a business-to-business product, is being showcased at IFA 2019. A pilot program is set to take place in Poland late this year and, if it does well there, may move to more of Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region.

Now if only peer-to-peer payments were just as versatile through Samsung Pay. Or, for that matter, if PayPal kept around NFC peer-to-peer payments from 2011.

Source: Samsung