Coffee chain Starbucks has expanded its Mobile Order & Pay service to the UK, allowing customers to use its iOS mobile app to pre-order and pay for their food and drinks in more than 150 stores across London... More
London
TfL records 180m contactless journeys
More than 180m journeys have been made using contactless payments on London’s transport network in the first year since its launch, Transport for London (TfL) has revealed... More
UK black cabs to get Bluetooth beacons
Commuters in taxi cabs across the UK cities of London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham will soon receive context-relevant messages as they travel... More
UK contactless spending up 150% in last 12 months
The amount that UK consumers are spending using contactless has risen 150% in the last 12 months, with the number of transactions up 134%, research from Barclaycard has revealed. ... More
London markets could go contactless
Londoners may soon be able to pay with their contactless cards at market stalls across the city as a result of the £20m London Regeneration Fund launched by mayor Boris Johnson... More
London buses get on board beacon rollout
Five hundred London buses have been equipped with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons to send targeted messages to commuters, as part of out-of-home media owner Exterion Media’s beacon rollout across “major cities” in the UK in partnership with mobile marketing and NFC specialist Proxama... More
Barclaycard launches second generation bPay wearable payment devices
Barclaycard has unveiled a second generation of its bPay wristbands and is to add contactless-enabled keyfobs and stickers to the range of bPay devices that will be made available for purchase on 1 July. More
30% of donors use contactless card during London charity trial
Nearly a third of shoppers at Westfield London shopping centre who donated to charity during a 100-day pilot put in place by the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), Save the Children and Visa Europe Collab used their contactless card, as did one in five who donated at one of the city’s Costa coffee shop counter collection points... More
Kiev subway goes contactless
The Ukrainian capital of Kiev has become the fifth city in the world, after London, St Petersburg, Chicago and Bucharest, to allow fares to be paid with open loop contactless cards... More
Contactless plan for London taxis
A proposal from Transport for London (TfL) explores whether contactless payments “with cards and other payment methods” should be accepted in all taxis across the city... More
Tesco puts beacons in 270 London stores
UK supermarket giant Tesco has launched its “biggest trial” of Bluetooth beacon technology to date in partnership with consumer goods company Unilever... More
Bookatable to roll out Pay-At-Table
UK online restaurant booking service Bookatable has integrated MyCheck mobile payments into its mobile app and will add pay-at-table functionality to more than 500 locations this summer, starting with Thai restaurant Busaba Eathai in London... More
Apple Pay adds loyalty cards and expands to UK
Apple Pay will be available in the UK from July 2015, vice president of Apple Pay business Jennifer Bailey has announced at the iPhone maker’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Users of the mobile payments service will also be able to add store credit, debit and loyalty cards to their Apple mobile wallet from “this fall”. More
UK retailers to go 100% contactless by 2020
“From the beginning of next year, any new payment terminal that gets deployed has to accept contactless,” MasterCard’s head of emerging payments products Mike Cowan told attendees at the company’s Future of Payments event in London this week, TechWeek Europe reports... More
TfL clocks up 100m contactless payment journeys
Transport for London (TfL) is now processing 1.2m open loop contactless payment transactions every day and is seeing 18,000 new contactless payment cards on a daily basis, with a total of 4m now in use... More
UK contactless transactions up nearly 50% in six months
The number of UK contactless transactions has risen by nearly 50% in the last six months from 16.33m in November 2014 to 24.4m in April this year, representing an increase of 964% in the last two years, payment processor Worldpay has revealed... More
UK contactless payments up 150%
The number of contactless transactions in the UK has risen 150% in the last six months, with the average transaction now valued at £7.24, payments processor Worldpay has revealed... More
Saracens fans get contactless payment wristbands
Supporters of Saracens rugby union club have been given prepaid contactless wristbands that let them pay for food and drink with a tap at the club’s Allianz Park stadium in north London, as well make payments outside the venue and travel on the city’s public transport network... More
Pub chain picks Droplet’s fee-free mobile payments and rewards
British brewer Adnams is to roll out a mobile payments and rewards service in its 12 stores and 50 pubs across East Anglia and London this summer using a fee-free platform provided by UK startup Droplet. More
UK to increase contactless transaction limit by 50%
The spending limit for contactless transactions is to be increased from £20 (US$30) to £30 (US$46) in September 2015, The UK Cards Association has told NFC World. The move follows the news last week that contactless card usage surged in the UK in 2014 to 319.2m transactions with total spend more than trebling to a record £2.32bn. More