Barclays has confirmed it will support Apple Pay in the UK “in the future,” having been a notable absence from the list of participating banks when Apple announced in June it would expand the mobile payments service... More
Standards body GlobalPlatform has updated its End-to-End Simplified Service Management Framework to make it easier and quicker for service providers to launch NFC payments services using a SIM or embedded secure element. The new guidelines reduce the time taken to deploy a service to just three to six months, and slim down the current 1,500 pages of documentation to only 30 pages. More
More than 17m users of Indian mobile wallet service MobiKwik will be able to make in-store payments at 55 WHSmith India stationery and book stores, the first time the service has been available for payments in physical locations... More
American Express has launched an online checkout service that works across desktop, mobile and native apps to let its US card members make payments with their existing American Express user ID and password, without having to create or manage a new account... More
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
Some 82% of US consumers have heard of contactless or tap-and-go payments and 69% are now using chip cards or plan to use them soon, research from MasterCard reveals... More
PARTNER NEWS: Digital security company Gemalto is supplying wristbands carrying an embedded Optelio Contactless Minitag and a fitness tracker across the transportation network in Wuhan — one of the most populous cities in central China — to enable commuters to ride on buses and the metro with a wave of their hand... More
British fashion designer Henry Holland is to integrate NFC and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technologies into clothing designs as part of his spring/summer 2016 collection that will feature on stage during London Fashion Week in September... More
Ant Financial has released a new version of its Alipay app for iOS and Android, adding new Friends and Merchants tabs that provide support for peer-to-peer payments and for Koubei, the US$1bn mobile commerce joint venture between Ant Financial and Alibaba that was announced last month. More
Barclays has become the latest bank to announce its support for Zapp, a mobile payments startup formed by payments infrastructure operator VocaLink that will work via an integration with existing mobile banking apps for online payments initially, with in-store payments based on NFC to be launched at a later date... More
Users of New Zealand’s NFC mobile wallet Semble will be able to pay for public transport using the app through a partnership with prepaid transit card provider Snapper... More
More than 400,000 viewers of France’s largest television shopping network will soon be able to buy products featured on the TV channel by holding up their smartphone to the screen to scan audio tags that will then redirect them to the item’s online page where they can make a purchase using their stored payment information... More
Lloyds Bank is testing a ‘tap to bank’ service that lets its mobile banking app users tap their contactless debit card against their NFC phone to authenticate themselves during the mobile banking registration process... More
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
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
Researchers from Nottingham Trent University (NTU) have invented a method of embedding NFC chips into yarns which are then woven and knitted to make fabrics for clothing... More
French spirits brand Rémy Martin is to launch a connected cognac bottle equipped with an NFC tag that will let consumers check the product is authentic and whether it has been opened and resealed, as well as allowing them to retrieve rewards and special offers after it has been purchased. More
The Fido Alliance has added new NFC and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) transport protocols to its Universal Second Factor (U2F) authentication specification... More
A quarter of UK consumers fear that using mobile payment services over cards and cash will see them spend more and make more impulse purchases, research from price comparison service uSwitch has revealed... More
Nearly 5,000 KFC China fast food restaurants will accept Alipay mobile payments next month, following in the footsteps of Walmart which is rolling out support for the service in all of its Chinese stores by the end of this year... More