South Africa’s Absa Bank is to be the first to develop a proof of concept trial of a new Visa specification that will enable the use of biometrics to verify EMV chip card transactions... More
Absa Bank to pilot new Visa biometric chip card spec
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High value contactless payments available across Europe in 2017
Consumers will be able to make contactless transactions for high value payments above the current limit at all contactless terminals across Europe by 2017, MasterCard has announced... More
Samsung Smart TVs to support Samsung Pay
Samsung Smart TV owners will be able to make payments directly on the device by selecting the item they wish to purchase, pressing Pay Now and entering a PIN... More
HKT launches NFC mobile payments service in Hong Kong
Hong Kong Telecommunications (HKT) subsidiary HKT Payment has launched a SIM-based NFC mobile payment service to let customers of its 1010 and Csl mobile service brands pay at more than three million locations worldwide which accept MasterCard PayPass, using funds stored in their Tap & Go mobile wallet account... More
Alfa-Bank customers get contactless watches to make payments
Customers of Russia’s Alfa-Bank can now use a contactless-enabled watch designed and supplied by Austrian company Watch2Pay to make payments with a tap of their wrist wherever MasterCard PayPass is accepted... More
Europeans make more than 1bn Visa contactless transactions in 12 months
More than one billion contactless transactions worth in excess of €12.6bn have been made by Visa cardholders across Europe in the past 12 months, research from Visa Europe has found, with its customers spending €1.6bn using their contactless cards in March 2015 alone — a three-fold increase compared to the same month in 2014... More
“Highly interested” Canadians ready for mobile payments
Some 14% of Canadian consumers say they are highly interested in making in-store mobile payments and 11% are also interested in using a wearable device such as a smartwatch to do so, research from payment services supplier Tsys has revealed... More
One in five Australians make in-store mobile payments
Three in ten Australians plan to use their smartphone for all their digital money and financial needs by 2017 and one in five (17%) are already using their smartphones to make in-store payments, research from lender Fair Go Finance reveals... More
Spanish supermarket chain Bonpreu rolls out mobile payments to 170 stores
Spanish supermarket chain Bonpreu is to roll out a mobile payments service to 170 stores, using a platform developed by Dinube that combines proprietary tokenization algorithms, NFC and biometric fingerprint security... More
ING to launch HCE in the Netherlands
ING is to launch a mobile payments service based on host card emulation (HCE) in the Netherlands this summer following a final test with a group of the bank’s employees... More
Intelligent Environments replaces PINs with emoji passcodes
Software provider Intelligent Environments has launched an emoji-only passcode system that lets consumers log into their bank’s mobile app using four emoji characters instead of traditional PINs... More
Apple Pay users in UK will be able to make payments above contactless card limit
Customers who choose to use Apple Pay when the service launches in the UK will be able to use the mobile payments service to make transactions over the current contactless limit of £20 (US$30) at select retail locations, according to Visa Europe’s executive director of mobile... More
NBO first to pilot contactless in Oman
National Bank of Oman (NBO) has become the first in the country to launch a contactless card pilot, in partnership with MasterCard... More
RBC unveils Android M mobile wallet app
Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has developed an app for the Android M Developer Preview that will be used as part of the bank’s RBC Wallet service to let users authenticate themselves using their fingerprint for signing in and making mobile payments... More
India gets PIN-free contactless payments
Contactless users in India can make payments of up to Rs2,000 (US$31) without using a PIN, following the Reserve Bank of India’s relaxation of its requirement for two-factor authentication... More
KFC serves up mobile payments in Ghana
KFC is letting customers use their phones to pay for meals through mobile network operator Airtel’s mobile money platform in five of the fast-food chain’s stores in Accra, Ghana... More
New Zealand NFC wallet venture Semble goes live
Close to one million New Zealanders now have the ability to make NFC payments with the nationwide launch of Semble, a SIM-based mobile wallet introduced by two New Zealand banks, three carriers and payments network Paymark... More
Vodafone combines tokens and SIMs for NFC payments in Europe
Vodafone customers in five major European markets will be able to use their Visa cards to make NFC mobile payments from the second quarter of this year with a new SIM-based service that makes use of tokenization technology. More
Facebook rolls out payments with Messenger app
Facebook users in the US will soon be able to make and receive secure mobile payments for free via the social network’s Messenger app... More
Seqr promotes mobile payments with cashback offers to users
Sweden-based mobile payments provider Seamless is offering users of its Seqr mobile payments service up to 3% cashback on their purchases, “valid on all purchases and effective on top of any other loyalty program or discount.” The offer is designed to persuade more consumers to adopt mobile payments, CEO Peter Fredell has told NFC World, and is financed via a mixture of revenue streams. More