Microsoft could be poised to enter the payments business after it emerged the software giant has applied for licenses to operate as a money transmitter in all 50 US states... More
USA
Apple Pay users report merchant POS problems
Two in three Apple Pay users have encountered a problem when attempting to pay with the mobile payment service in a store, a survey from Phoenix Marketing International reveals... More
One in five US mobile phone users made a mobile payment in 2014
22% of US mobile phone users made a mobile payment last year, up from 17% in 2013, research from the Federal Reserve Board reveals... 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
Four in ten US iPhone 6 owners have now used Apple Pay
Apple Pay has been tried at least once by 42% of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners in the US, a survey by Auriemma Consulting Group (ACG) has found — and almost half the owners who haven’t yet tried the NFC mobile payments service (47%) say they intend to do so within the next six months... More
Most iPhone 6 owners yet to use Apple Pay
Four in five iPhone 6 and 6+ owners in the US are yet to make use of Apple Pay (79%), a Trustev survey has found... More
Starbucks expands mobile ordering
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
SXSW to deploy 1,000 beacons
The organizers of the annual SXSW music and film festival are working with Gimbal, RightRound and Urban Airship to place 1,000 Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons around the event’s venues... More
Apple Pay now at 700,000 locations
Apple Pay is now accepted “at nearly 700,000 locations” and “works with over 2,500 banks”, Apple has announced at its Spring Forward launch event... More
Apple stores hit hardest by Apple Pay fraudsters
Credit card data stolen in recent data breaches at big retailers has led to a wave of fraudulent Apple Pay transactions, reports the Wall Street Journal... More
Softcard to close down on 31 March
The Softcard mobile wallet service is to close down altogether at the end of March 2015 in the wake of a deal between Google and the three US carriers that founded the NFC payments venture... More
US identity fraud drops, but breaches scare consumers
The number of victims of identity fraud in the US decreased 3% to 12.7 million in 2014 and total fraud losses declined to US$16 billion — a decrease of 11% from 2013 — a study from Javelin Strategy & Research has found... More
SpotMe app lets Android users spend Apple Pay cash
Android users can spend their iPhone-owning friends’ money using a new app that can capture NFC payment transaction tokens from other devices and hold onto them before spending them later. More
PayPal readies contactless reader
PayPal is preparing to launch a new version of its PayPal Here card reader that can handle transactions with contactless cards and NFC devices... More
PayPal to buy MCX supplier Paydiant
Paypal is to acquire Paydiant, a white label mobile payments specialist and developer of a platform that allows retailers to incorporate payment, loyalty and offers functionality into their own apps... More
Video shows Samsung Pay in action
A short video published by MasterCard shows Samsung’s new Samsung Pay mobile payment service in action, demonstrating how a user chooses a payment card, authenticates and then holds their phone next to a standard payment terminal to conduct a transaction... More
Samsung Pay’s success in the US is not assured, says expert
Google’s recent acquisition of Softcard’s NFC payments business may hit Samsung Pay’s prospects for widespread US adoption hard, says a respected payments consultant... More
Niemann Foods rolls out beacon marketing
Niemann Foods has installed a Bluetooth beacon marketing platform provided by Birdzi in eight of its County Market stores and plans to roll out the solution to all its 45 County Market locations in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri in the coming months... More
MasterCard discusses how Samsung Pay works
Samsung Pay, the tokenized mobile payment system introduced with the Samsung Galaxy S6, will first attempt to use NFC and then fall back to magnetic stripe emulation technology to offer widest compatibility with merchant terminals, MasterCard’s Matt Barr has told NFC World... More
Apple Pay provisioning fraud hole “has to get plugged now”
“Rampant” fraud levels being experienced by US card issuers that have signed up for Apple Pay need to be addressed with urgency, payments consultant Cherian Abraham has told NFC World, to avoid Apple, the individual banks and tokenized mobile payments as a whole suffering a reputational damage... More