Public transportation operator First Group has begun a pilot of a new mobile ticketing service that uses host card emulation (HCE) to let customers with an Android NFC phone purchase a bus ticket, provision it to Google Pay and then use their smartphone to tap an on-board contactless reader when they board a bus... More
Employees of 14 Vancouver-based businesses have been issued with a new type of transit card that lets them use a single payment method for travel on public transport operator TransLink, for bike sharing with Mobi by Shaw Go and car sharing with Modo and Evo — and then “view expenses for each mode at the end of the month in one convenient location, through a streamlined expense report”... More
A new bus ticketing system that lets passengers use face recognition to make hands-free payments for their tickets has entered pilot testing in Kazakhstan’s capital city of Nur-Sultan... More
The Australian state of Queensland has begun the first of a series of pilots ahead of the rollout of its A$371m (US$249m) Smart Ticketing system, due to go live in 2022. A one-month pilot of new express ticketing gates is taking place at Brisbane’s Central Station More
Samsung’s NFC phone-based contactless payments acceptance service is now live in Canada and is to be introduced globally “starting in 2020”, the company has announced... More
Madrid public transportation operator EMT has announced plans to run two next-generation transportation payments pilots... More
The UK’s NatWest bank has begun a three-month pilot of a biometric credit card that enables customers to make contactless transactions of up to £100 (US$123) instead of the usual maximum value of £30 (US$37)... More
A new store in the largest shopping and entertainment complex in North America has opened as a testbed for the latest retail technologies — and products on sale have been equipped with NFC tags... More
Russia’s PSB bank has begun the country’s first pilot of dongle-free contactless payments acceptance on standard Android NFC devices. The new SoftPOS service “allows you to turn any NFC phone running Android 7.0 (and above) into a fully fledged POS terminal,” the bank says. More
New York Mets fans attending games at the team’s Citi Field home field can now purchase snacks and beverages at a self-checkout kiosk that uses a biometrics-based identity verification system to process payments — and check that buyers of alcoholic drinks are of legal drinking age... More
European supermarket group Ahold Delhaize is to equip its stores in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece, Czech Republic, Serbia and Romania with NFC-enabled electronic shelf edge labels that shoppers can tap to obtain more information about a product — and then add the items to their shopping basket so that they can self-checkout on their mobile phone... More
Merchants in Poland are to be the first to pilot a new service that enables them to accept contactless payments of any amount “via a smartphone or tablet, in the same way a traditional payment terminal functions but with no additional equipment”... More
A biometric payments system that uses the shape of a shopper’s hand to identify them at the point of sale (POS) is currently being tested by Amazon employees ahead of a planned pilot at “a handful” of Whole Foods supermarkets early next year, the New York Post reports... More
A group of seven mobile payments service providers with a combined user base of 25 million people in nine European countries have formed a new association to deliver “interoperability of the mobile payment systems across national borders”... More
Shoppers at 7-Eleven stores in New York can now use their mobile phones to self-checkout and pay for their purchases, the convenience store giant has announced. “Mobile Checkout takes convenience to the next level, letting customers in New York City skip the checkout.” More
Trentino Trasporti, the transportation operator for the Italian city of Trento, is to be the first to pilot a new transit ticketing concept that uses sensors placed on trains to calculate and charge passengers for fares by automatically detecting when they get on and off a particular service... More
Daimler Trucks has announced the successful completion of a proof-of-concept pilot of Truck Wallet, a machine-to-machine (M2M) payments service designed to enable vehicles to automatically pay for road tolls, electric charging and other services — without involving or interacting with the driver... More
Korea’s Shinhan Card has begun testing Shinhan Face Pay, a face recognition payments system that it is developing with CU convenience stores operator BGF Retail “to identify customers who visit unmanned convenience stores in the future”... More
Israel Railways starts plan to pay for rides using credit cards — The Jerusalem Post — “Israel Railways has launched a two-month contactless payment pilot programme, aiming to soon enable all rail users to ‘tap and go’ with their credit card rather than purchase a ticket or use a preloaded Rav-Kav smartcard… Pilot participants will initially be charged daily based on purchasing full price one-way tickets, although Israel Railways intends to introduce season tickets and discounts for senior citizens, students and other groups in the near future.”
Domino’s Is starting to ditch cash payments — Gizmodo Australia — “The pizza maker is calling it ‘Tap & Take’ and is positioning it as a way to make the ordering process both quicker and more convenient… Domino’s has stated that the participating stores will accept ‘all forms of payment’, except for cash. This includes card payments, PayPal, Apple Pay, Android Pay, EFTPOS to door and Instagift.”