PARTNER NEWS: Zimbabwean mobile payments service EcoCash, powered by Mahindra Comviva’s Mobiquity Money platform, has been named Best Mobile Payment Solution at the Mobile World Congress Glomo Awards... More
Archive: News in brief
NXP signs deals to add NFC to cars
PARTNER NEWS: Five “leading car OEMs” are to integrate NFC technology from NXP into cars to enable a variety of secure interactions including vehicle access, Bluetooth and WiFi pairing, personalization and payments, the chip maker has announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona... More
Mastercard and Visa expand availability of QR payments
Visa’s mVisa QR-based mobile payment service is now live in India, Kenya and Rwanda and will soon be available in Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Vietnam, the company has announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona... More
PayPal reports 50% rise in mobile payments
A third of all transactions processed by PayPal are now conducted using a mobile device, PayPal COO Bill Ready has revealed, with the company processing more than US$31bn in mobile payments in the fourth quarter of 2016 — up 53% from the same period in 2015... More
Huawei includes NFC payments in new smartwatch
Huawei has unveiled a new smartwatch at Mobile World Congress that supports NFC payments... More
China’s central bank tests digital currency for in-store payments
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has conducted trial runs of a prototype cryptocurrency it has been developing since 2014 that could be used “to buy anything from noodles to a car”, The Straits Times reports... More
Google Assistant comes to more Android phones
Google Assistant will be made available to all phones running Android 7.0 Nougat and Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating systems, Reuters reports... More
GSMA predicts 1.1bn 5G connections by 2025
The GSMA forecasts there will be 1.1bn 5G mobile connections by 2025, with 5G networks providing one in eight of all mobile connections and driving “massive rollout of intelligent IoT nodes for a multitude of scenarios”... More
BNP Paribas launches HCE mobile payments
Customers of French bank BNP Paribas will soon be able to make host card emulation (HCE) based mobile payments through the bank’s mobile banking app and Paylib, an online payment platform supported by the country’s main banks... More
India Post to enable Aadhaar money transfers
India Post is to allow consumers to send and receive money using only their Aadhaar number from September 2017, when the government-operated postal system launches its own payments bank... More
Metro Bank adds Android Pay in UK
Metro Bank in the UK is now offering support for Android Pay... More
India’s Mobikwik aims to triple user base in 2017
Indian mobile wallet MobiKwik is to invest Rs 3bn (US$45m) to triple its user base and raise the total volume of transactions on its platform to $10bn in 2017, The Times of India reports... More
Consumers show more trust in mobile wallet security
Global consumers are “more concerned” with protecting their financial and payments information on a computer than protecting the same data in a mobile wallet, ACI Worldwide and Aite Group research reveals, with more than 80% believing their mobile wallet data is secure... More
US banks launch money-transfer app
Nineteen US banks have launched Zelle, the mobile P2P money transfer service unveiled last October to compete with the likes of Venmo, allowing users to send money directly to each other’s bank accounts within minutes... More
UK bank tests voice commands with Google Home
Starling Bank, a UK mobile-only bank, is testing an integration of its API with Google Home, the voice-activated speaker powered by Google Assistant... More
Visa Token Service to spread across Europe in 2017
The Visa Token Service platform will be available in more than 12 European countries by the end of 2017, Visa has announced... More
Bank of China brings Apple Pay to UnionPay credit cards
Bank of China has become the first bank in Hong Kong to offer Apple Pay with UnionPay credit cards... More
Belgian bank to launch HCE mobile payments
Customers of Belgium’s Belfius Bank will soon be able to make host card emulation (HCE) based mobile payments using a service integrated with the Belfius Mobile banking app... More
Apple and Samsung boost Russian interest in virtual cards
The launch of Apple Pay and Samsung Pay in Russia helped to produce a fivefold increase in the number of consumers using online payment service Yandex.Money to pay for goods and services in 2016, Vedemosti reports... More
Ant Financial invests in Korea and Philippines
Alipay parent company Ant Financial is to invest US$200m in South Korean mobile finance platform Kakao Pay to “expand its online and offline payment coverage”... More