PARTNER NEWS: The technology used to boost the NFC signal in Apple’s iPhone 6 and 6 Plus is now being made available for easy use by a wide range of wearable device and mobile phone makers, courtesy of a partnership between Apple supplier AMS and STMicroelectronics... More
Google is working on an Android Pay API that will be “built from the ground up” for Android developers and makes use of host card emulation, “a source close to the matter” has told Ars Technica... More
MasterCard is currently conducting more than 25 host card emulation (HCE) projects in 15 countries, the payments network has announced, with multiple issuers now moving close to commercial deployments... More
Apple Pay fraud levels are now “rampant” with every Apple Pay (AP) issuer having seen “significant” provisioning fraud, payments consultant Cherian Abraham claims in a detailed blog post... More
Google Wallet will be pre-installed on all Android phones supplied by Softcard partners AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless from “later this year”, Ariel Bardin, Google’s vice president of payments, has announced... More
Google is in a new round of discussions with mobile network operators to get its Google Wallet payments service widely distributed on mobile devices, the Wall Street Journal reports, with incentives on offer believed to include paying carriers to feature Google Wallet prominently on their Android phones and, potentially, a share of advertising revenues... More
Fans of FC Barcelona are now able to use their smartphones instead of paper tickets to gain access to the Nou Camp stadium... More
Samsung Electronics has announced it is to buy LoopPay, the startup that has developed a way for mobile payments to be made at standard magnetic stripe card terminals... More
“Apple Pay has hit bumps in China despite Apple’s efforts to make friends with Alibaba and UnionPay,” Caixin reports... More
Google is testing a service called Plaso “that allows people carrying Android phones to pay at retailers like Papa John’s and Panera Bread by saying their initials to employees at the cash register,” The Information reports, citing “four people who have been involved in or briefed about it.” The pilot has been live since “last fall”... More
Samsung Pay, “a payment feature which works with magnetic and NFC terminals” will ship with the Korean phone maker’s forthcoming Galaxy S6 mobile phone, BGR reports, citing a “trusted source”... More
PARTNER NEWS: Token requestors play a key role in the delivery of mobile payment services like Apple Pay, Doug Yeager, CEO of SimplyTapp, explains in a blog post — and taking the time to get a detailed understanding of what that role involves could pay dividends in the future... More
Google is responding to the successful launch of Apple Pay by going on the mobile payments acquisition trail, according to industry rumours — and US carrier-owned NFC venture Softcard, which laid off 60 staff last week, could be a key target... More
Android Pay, the mobile payments service being developed by China UnionPay, will use both NFC and fingerprint verification, Want China Times reports... More
China UnionPay (CUP), the country’s official card payments network, has issued notifications to its member banks to tell them “to avoid working with third-party payment services like Alipay”, Want China Times reports... More
Google is to “retire” its Google Wallet for digital goods API and has told merchants who currently let customers pay for digital goods via Google Wallet on their websites that they will need to remove API calls to the service by 2 March 2015... More
MasterCard is working with Visa to create a new authentication standard for online payments that will gradually replace the 3D Secure protocol with “invisible authentication”, far fewer prompts for passwords and support for a range of biometric technologies... 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
PARTNER NEWS: Host card emulation (HCE) specialist SimplyTapp has closed a US$6m Series B funding round... More
A total of 8bn secure elements will be shipped this year, with SIM cards accounting for 5.1bn of the total, according to new statistics released by smart security industry association Eurosmart, with the total rising to 12bn in 2020... More