Mobile POS provider Square has blamed a “change we made to one of our back-end systems” for a service outage which affected payments and other services earlier this week... More
Archive: News in brief
Rambus predicts how we will pay in 2020
PARTNER NEWS: An eight-page guide exploring how key developments in mobile payments will shape the industry in the next three years is now available to download from the NFC World Knowledge Centre... More
Starbucks takes mobile payments to India
Starbucks customers in India can now use their phones to pay for orders and earn loyalty program ‘Stars’ following the launch of the Starbucks India app... More
India opens way for direct mobile wallet transfers?
Indian mobile wallet users could soon be able to transfer money directly to each other, regardless of the service they use, if the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) goes ahead with plans to open up the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) platform to mobile wallet providers... More
FNB reports ‘sharp rise’ for contactless in South Africa
South Africa’s First National Bank (FNB) has seen a 270% increase in the number of contactless payments made with its credit cards over the last six months... More
Samsung Galaxy S8 to use face recognition for payments?
Samsung’s Galaxy S8 flagship smartphone “will employ facial-recognition technology for mobile payments within months of release,” Bloomberg reports... More
McDonald’s begins mobile order and pay trial
Fast food giant McDonald’s has begun testing its mobile order and pay service at 29 restaurants in the Californian cities of Monterey and Salinas... More
PrivatBank adds Mastercard to HCE payments
Ukraine’s PrivatBank has now made host card emulation (HCE) based mobile payments available for its Mastercard cardholders, using the Mastercard Digital Enablement Service (MDES)... More
ING offers Mastercard HCE payments in Poland
Mastercard cardholders at Polish bank ING Bank Śląski can now make host card emulation (HCE) based mobile payments using a ‘Mastercard on the Phone’ feature inside the My ING app... More
Safe mobile recharge service for women to roll out across India
PARTNER NEWS: A service to improve women’s safety, by allowing them to recharge their prepaid mobile account at any retail outlet with a private code generated by SMS rather than their phone number, will roll out across India later this month... More
Security fears hit confidence in mobile payments
More than two thirds of global consumers (70%) fear hackers could steal their personal information when they use a mobile wallet, and 67% worry their money could be stolen, a report from Oxford Economics and Charney Research says... More
Capital One pilots text-based banking chatbot
A group of Capital One customers have begun piloting Eno, a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to answer requests for account information and to pay bills via SMS and emojis... More
Gmail offers Android app money transfer
Gmail users in the US can now send and receive money through the email service’s Android mobile app... More
Car makers back NFC and Bluetooth for digital keys
The Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) has outlined how technologies such as NFC and Bluetooth can be used for digital car keys in a white paper discussing its Digital Key project — a standardisation effort for digital key adoption... More
Vodafone Wallet adds PayPal in the Netherlands
Vodafone has added PayPal as a payment option to its NFC-based Vodafone Wallet mobile payment service in the Netherlands... More
Industry bodies to standardise management of NFC services
Industry bodies ETSI, GlobalPlatform and the NFC Forum are working together to standardise the implementation and management of NFC services “across all technologies and platforms”... More
Boston Fed calls for more education to boost mobile payments
The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston says awareness of mobile payments “continues to grow” but “more education for consumers and employees” is needed to achieve mass adoption of mobile and digital wallets... More
KredoBank launches HCE mobile payments in Ukraine
Customers of Ukraine’s KredoBank can now make host card emulation (HCE) based mobile payments by adding Mastercard credit or debit cards to its new KredoPay wallet... More
ST discovery kit speeds time to market for contactless applications
PARTNER NEWS: STMicroelectronics has combined its ST25R3911B NFC reader IC and its STM32L476RE microcontroller into a discovery kit designed to accelerate time to market for a wide range of contactless applications, including ticketing, asset tracking, device authentication, sensor data collection and access control... More
JPMorgan Chase to buy MCX payments technology
US bank JPMorgan Chase is to acquire the payments technology of US retailer-led consortium MCX to “help expand” the Chase Pay mobile payments service... More