Samsung in talks to launch Apple Pay competitor

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Samsung has discussed a deal with a payments startup that would help the smartphone maker unveil a wireless mobile payments system in 2015 to rival Apple, according to multiple sources.

The technology would allow people with certain Samsung phones to pay in the vast majority of brick-and-mortar stores by waving their phones instead of swiping with a credit card or cash.

This sounds so familiar to me.

Graylin said his company has been in discussions with financial services companies such as Visa, which is an investor in LoopPay, about finding a more secure way to pass payment data from one of its devices, or a phone, to a store’s checkout system. LoopPay hopes to use a system known as tokenization, which substitutes a shopper’s card information with a unique placeholder, to accomplish this. The token is later matched up with a specific credit card account by a card network or bank. A merchant never receives or stores the actual payment information.

Huh, tokens used in a payment system. Wait, don’t tell me, I know I’ve heard this idea somewhere before.