While a lot of the features announced in the new Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, like curved edges and glass-and-metal design, are examples of Samsung playing catching up on the latest smartphone trends, but Samsung’s new mobile payments app certainly isn’t one of them. Apple and Google may brought their contactless payment technologies to the market first, but Samsung Pay fills in sizable gaps that Apple Pay and Google Wallet have in their services.

Samsung Pay uses both near-field communications (NFC) and magnetic secure transmission (MST) technology from LoopPay. That means it can not only make the same secure contactless transactions like Apple Pay, but it can also make “swipe” purchases on the vast majority of older payments terminals that haven’t upgraded to NFC. Samsung has also retooled the new smartphones’ fingerprint sensors so they works with a press not a swipe, making it easier to initiate a purchase with a thumb tap.

Just as significant as the technology is Samsung’s broader financial ecosystem. It’s brought MasterCard and Visa to the table as partners along with four of the largest card-issuing banks: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi and US Bank (At the launch event, Samsung CEO JK Shin said they were just a few of the financial deals Samsung had signed). Banking deals were one of the key reasons Apple Pay was a big initial hit, as consumers could load almost any of their existing debit and credit cards into the iPhone’s contactless wallet.

The new Galaxy S6

For Samsung those bank deals are particularly important because the biggest selling point for its mobile wallet is that it will work on a far larger variety of terminals in the U.S. than Apple Pay or any other NFC-only payment app. Well, if the banks hadn’t gotten on board Samsung wouldn’t have been able to make that argument come this fall.

The U.S. is finally making the leap to EMV credit cards, which use a smart chip to send encrypted data to a payments terminal. It’s a much more secure technology, and Samsung’s MST technology can’t emulate it like it can the numbers stored on the mag stripe of credit. But with the banks apparently lining up to work with Samsung Pay that’s not a problem Samsung has to worry about anymore. The banks can simply pass that encrypted card data from the cloud to a secure element in the Galaxy S6 or S6 Edge, which the phone then passes either through its NFC radio or magnetically, depending on which technology is available at the terminal.

Samsung Pay will not only make both “smart” and “dumb” transactions, so to speak, but it has the potential to turn what would normally be insecure static payment into a more secure dynamic one. As LoopPay co-founder and now Samsung employee Will Graylin recently explained to me, MST can send dynamic data through a magnetic read head designed only take static data. The terminal thinks its just getting a regular credit card number, but Samsung Pay could send out a prefix code that alerts the payment processor that the numbers its about to receive are EMV cryptograms. Samsung Pay can even use the same method to send tokens – one-time-use numbers supported in the newest payment technologies – through even the oldest, junkiest card readers.