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
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
Samsung Pay is preparing to launch in India... 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
Customers of BMO Harris Bank in the US can now send and receive money through People Pay, a mobile P2P payments service added to its mobile banking 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
Consumers with Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge devices can now log into select websites and mobile apps using their fingerprint and Samsung Pass, the biometric authentication service unveiled by Samsung in August 2016... 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
US retail giant Target is to introduce its own mobile payment service to “one or more of its own apps” later this year, the company’s Michael McNamara has told Recode... More
Tesco has made its PayQwiq mobile payments service available in all of its stores across the UK following “positive feedback” from customers during the initial roll out to 524 stores in April 2016... More
Passengers on UK rail company Chiltern Railways will soon be able to travel without tickets using a service integrating a mobile app with Bluetooth and geolocation services, which will track commuters throughout their journey, give them access through ticket barriers and automatically charge them the best price for the route taken... More
Niti Aayog, an Indian government policy think tank, is producing an index to rank Indian states based on the number of digital transactions made, according to Economic Times... More
HSBC is to launch a P2P mobile payments app in Hong Kong early this year that will allow customers of any bank to transfer money using a recipient’s mobile phone number... More