US Bancorp is planning to launch its own mobile wallet services. A company executive Niti Badarinath made this announcement in the  Bank Innovation 2015 in Seattle, iterating that it is something they are working on.

Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp (NYSE:USB), with $403 billion in assets as of Dec. 31, 2014, is the parent company of U.S. Bank National Association, the fifth largest commercial bank in the United States. The company operates 3,176 banking offices in 25 states and 5,022 ATMs and provides a comprehensive line of banking, investment, mortgage, trust and payment services products to consumers, businesses and institutions.

USB in an earlier press release had announced that it’s working with Samsung Electronics Co. to enable U.S. Bank cardmembers to use the new Samsung Galaxy S6 phone for credit-card transactions as the bank continues to develop secure, convenient and innovative payment options.

“We’re thrilled to have payments become a core capability of the mobile phone,” said Pam Joseph, vice chairman and head of U.S. Bank Payment Services. “The result of mobile payments is that our customers can use the same, familiar credit-card payment system but with added security and convenience.”

Samsung Pay, developed in partnership with Visa and MasterCard, uses both Near Field Communication (NFC) and a new proprietary technology called Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) to make mobile payments more accessible to merchants and consumers than ever before.

While Badarinath explained that US Bank has changed its view of digital innovation, no longer looking at single-channel innovations, but taking an “omni-channel” view of the services it offers. With that view, Badarinath explained that USB officials now presume that their customers ask, “Why do I need a banking app and a wallet app?”(Source: bankinnovation)

With only Apple Pay carving out a niche in the mobile payments sector so far, it remains to be seen how the upheaval of mobile ‘Pay’ services fare in the market.

(image credit: Ian Sane)