Apple Pay has the largest percentage of supporting US merchants with 36% accepting the mobile payment service today, up from 16% last year, research released by Boston Retail Partners (BRP) reveals... More
Some 84% of US consumers say they would enjoy shopping at an Amazon Go automated store more than a traditional grocery store, but a fifth think they would lose out on traditional shopping experiences by doing so, the results of a survey of 1,000 shoppers released by packaging solutions provider Shorr Packaging show... More
Australian banks are using fees on Apple Pay transactions as a “trojan horse” to discourage the use of its mobile payments service and to condition consumers to accept transaction fees with the “longer term view to setting a precedent for charging for mobile payments on other digital wallets,” Apple claims in its latest submission to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC)... More
Ten Smart Benches have been installed across London to enable passersby to donate £2 (US$3) to Cancer Research UK with a tap of their contactless debit or credit card. The Smart Bench network is currently being piloted in two boroughs in the city, with a further 90 benches to be permanently rolled out later this year. More
Festival goers at the St Jerome’s Laneway Festival taking place across five Australian cities are trialling prototype sunglasses that let them make contactless payments by tapping them against a contactless POS terminal... More
Bus passengers in northern England are trialling a mobile ticketing system that works with Bluetooth beacons placed on buses and at bus stops, and a smartphone app that tracks the user’s journey and then charges them the best-value price over the course of a day or week... More
Google is ending its Hands Free mobile payments pilot in one week’s time in order to focus its efforts on “bringing the best of the Hands Free technology to a wider audience,” according to the company... More
Samsung is to launch a pared-down version of Samsung Pay which will make the mobile payments service available on all Android handsets... More
The Government of India has introduced a series of incentives designed to encourage consumers and businesses to adopt digital and mobile payments and significantly reduce the use of cash in the economy — including plans to encourage banks to introduce one million point-of-sale terminals by March 2017, rising to two million by September... More
GlobalPlatform has released a new framework that gives consumers control over which secure applications can be used within part of the secure element (SE) of their trusted devices, without compromising security for the SE as a whole. More
US consumers can now order a discounted Uber ride by tapping their NFC smartphone against a bag of Tostitos tortilla chips when they have had too much to drink. The bag detects the presence of alcohol on a person’s breath and shows either a green or red steering wheel to alert the consumer of whether or not they are safe to drive home. More
The number of Apple Pay users has more than tripled over the past year, with transaction volume up 500% year-over-year, Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed during the company’s first quarter earnings call. The mobile payment service is also expected to launch in Taiwan “soon”. More
A 14-page white paper that aims to educate public transport operators, mobile network operators and handset manufacturers on how to implement NFC technology across transportation systems, while ensuring consistent, reliable and efficient performance between devices and mobile ticketing systems, is now available to download from the NFC World Knowledge Centre. More
US consumers can now place orders from coffee giant Starbucks by speaking into the Starbucks iOS mobile app or to Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa. The move comes as the company reveals that mobile orders made up 7% of all its US transactions in the last quarter, with mobile payments now accounting for 27%. More
Nearly one fifth of global consumers (18%) have made an in-store mobile payment in the past six months, representing an increase of 10% from the same period in 2014, research released by trade body Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) reveals. Chinese consumers lead the way, with 38% of them having paid with their phone at the point of sale — nearly double the global average. More
Mobile payments accounted for a third of PayPal’s overall payment volume during the fourth quarter of 2016, the company’s CEO Dan Schulman has revealed, with the total volume of mobile payments increasing by 55% over the course of last year. More
Social media giant Facebook has added the Fido Alliance’s Universal Second Factor (U2F) specification to its platform to strengthen its range of two-factor authentication methods which have previously been offered through an SMS service or by a code generation feature inside the Facebook mobile app... More
The number of monthly US Apple Pay credit card transactions conducted in-app, online and at the in-store point of sale grew by 50% between December 2015 and December 2016, research released by consumer spending analytics portal TXN reveals, with mobile apps and websites attracting the highest proportion of transactions... More
PARTNER NEWS: Commuters across western Scotland are to begin testing a host card emulation (HCE) based ticketing service in the second quarter of 2017, that will enable them to securely load a virtual smart card to their mobile phone and pay for journeys across the Glasgow Subway with a tap of their NFC device... More
Google is adding support for host card emulation (HCE) based NFC payments to smartwatches in Android Wear 2.0, the new version of its operating system for smartwatches which is scheduled to be released in early February 2017... More