Apple Pay is finally coming to South Korea, eight years after its initial introduction

Apple Pay is finally coming to South Korea, some eight years after its initial launch. The arrival of the service in Samsung’s home country has been talked about a lot recently, and today Apple confirmed the move in the Korean version of its press release announcing the new yellow models of the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus.

The machine-translated relevant paragraph sounds like this:

Also, as Apple is launching Apple Pay in South Korea, Korean users will be able to make easy, fast and secure payments using Apple Pay on their iPhone, including the new iPhone Yellow, and in online merchants and apps. .

There’s still no exact launch date for Apple Pay, but the service overcame a major hurdle last month when South Korea’s Financial Services Commission confirmed that credit card companies in the country are authorized to offer Apple Pay as long as they don’t charge consumers or merchants any fees for it.

Perhaps it won’t surprise you to learn that Samsung Pay absolutely dominates the mobile payments space in its home market, achieving around 80% market share. This will now definitely be absorbed by Apple Pay.

iOS 16.4, which is currently in beta testing, has some references to Apple Pay in South Korea, so the service could officially launch in the country once this update is released later this month or early April .