US consumers will soon be able to reorder supplies and control their home appliances using Amazon Echo, the connected device that uses voice recognition to complete spoken commands to shop, play music, read the news and more... More
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
Facebook has extended its ‘buy’ button pilot to US retailers using the Shopify commerce platform... More
Google has announced it will pilot a new payment service in the San Francisco Bay area later this year that will let users make hands-free, in-store mobile payments without having to get their phone out of their pocket... More
Employees of Germany’s Postbank have begun piloting a mobile payment service based on host card emulation (HCE) that makes use of tokenization to allow NFC payments to be made at any Visa payWave terminal... More
Out-of-home media owner Exterion Media UK is to roll out Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons across public transport services in “major cities” in the UK to deliver marketing messages to passengers’ smartphones... More
An NFC transport ticketing trial in the Netherlands will allow passengers to see on their phones if they have correctly checked themselves on or off the service as they travel, avoiding the risk of paying too much for their journeys... More
UK bank Halifax is investigating how Bionym’s Nymi Band, a device that uses the wearer’s unique cardiac rhythm to authenticate their identity, could be used to reduce the need for customers to remember their passwords... More
Coffee chain Starbucks is expanding its Mobile Order & Pay service to 650 locations in the US states of Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Alaska following a trial which has been running in Portland since December 2014... More
First Tech Federal Credit Union is to run a pilot later this year in partnership with MasterCard that will see cardholders being given the ability to authenticate and verify their transactions using a combination of face, voice and fingerprint verification... More
Oil and gas company Shell has partnered with PayPal to roll out mobile payments at the pump across the “vast majority” of its 1,000 service stations in the UK... More
Facebook has unveiled a new service called Place Tips that works with Bluetooth beacons, WiFi and GPS to show the social network’s iOS app users “useful and relevant” information about the places they visit... More
South Africa’s Nedbank is internally testing a proof-of-concept mobile payments app called Accolades that uses BLE beacons to connect customers to retailers as they enter the store... More
Barclaycard has begun ‘testing’ woollen gloves that can be used to make payments at any of the 300,000 contactless POS terminals in the UK with a touch of a hand... More
Barclays is to run a three month Bluetooth beacon technology trial at its Pinstone Street branch in Sheffield, UK, to alert bank staff to the presence of customers with disabilities... More
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons that use energy harvesting technology to avoid the need to change batteries have been installed by Japan Airlines (JAL) at 13 major Japanese airports to provide users of its JAL Countdown mobile app with “real-time departure, gate and other timely information”... More
NFC-on-microSD pioneer DeviceFidelity has been acquired by Kili Technology, a payments processing solution provider which launched an mPOS “solution-on-a-chip” range last month... More
Four in ten (42%) of the 200 cardholders who took part in a trial of Zwipe’s biometric payment card conducted by Norway’s Sparebanken say they think the fingerprint security solution is more secure than using a PIN code to verify a transaction... More
Australia’s ANZ is to launch an NFC-enabled mobile wallet in early 2015, following a successful trial of the service... More
MCX member Target has integrated Apple Pay into its mobile app but is not accepting payments via Apple Pay in its stores, the retailer has told NFC World+... More