Samsung Pay is planning to implement in-app purchases to help fuel its growth. The news came by way of Samsung Pay Europe head Nathalie Oestmann, who spoke about the potential move to CNBC during last week’s Money20/20 Europe conference.

In embracing such a concept, Samsung would be playing catch-up against its competitors, with such functionality already enabled on Android Pay and Apple Pay. Moreover, the latter may be a further step ahead as it is reportedly working to implement web app purchases. In so doing, Apple Pay would push its platform even further beyond the world of mPayments, and may encourage its competitors to likewise strive to offer overall payments platforms that could rival PayPal, which has so far dominated the traditional, non-mobile digital payments space.

Samsung Pay could prove truly innovative with another idea mentioned by Oestmann: Enabling VR purchases that would let users of its virtual reality technology to browse virtual stores and make purchases in those spaces via Samsung Pay. But that’s purely hypothetical for the time being – Oestmann referred only to speculative “conversations we have been hearing about” – so for now it seems that in-app purchases is the next logical step for Samsung Pay.

Source: CNBC