Yaap, a joint venture between Spanish banks CaixaBank and Banco Santander and mobile network operator Telefonica, has launched a mobile commerce platform that lets consumers access merchant offers on their mobile device and then redeem them automatically by simply paying for a purchase with a pre-linked debit or credit card... More
Groupement des Cartes Bancaires CB, the French bank card association which pioneered the use of chip cards for payments in the 1980s, expects to enable member banks to issue customers with keyfobs supporting fingerprint payments by the end of this year... More
Australia’s Bendigo Bank has partnered with Samsung to rollout Redy, a mobile payments service that lets shoppers make payments and receive rewards by scanning a QR code generated by a merchant’s tablet-based POS terminal... More
PrePay Solutions (PPS), a prepaid card program manager jointly owned by MasterCard and Edenred, has partnered with NFC specialist Proxama to provide its clients the ability to offer host card emulation-based NFC services to their customers... More
Barclaycard is to make contactless payment wristbands available to anyone with a UK bank account or credit card next year... More
Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District (NICTD) has partnered with mobile ticketing provider Bytemark to provide travellers on the South Shore Line with a way to purchase and store train tickets on their mobile device... More
Prepaid voucher provider Groupon has launched an iPad-based point-of-sale terminal that uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to let merchants “instantly recognize their Groupon customers as they enter their business, seamlessly redeem Groupons and save time and money.”... More
Standard Bank, one of South Africa’s largest financial services groups, has launched a service that allows small merchants to accept mobile payments by simply placing a QR code at their point of sale, with no POS terminal required... More
Hungary’s OTP Bank has launched a mobile wallet that allows consumers to pay in stores by scanning a QR code placed next to the cash register... More
Canadian payments and money transfer provider nTrust has begun piloting a new mobile payments service that uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons placed in stores to make wireless purchases... More
Deutsche Telekom has launched MyWallet, an NFC service that allows customers with any of 18 supported Samsung and Sony Android NFC devices to make payments at MasterCard PayPass merchants... More
The Royal Bank of Canada has expanded the functionality and availability of its cloud-based RBC Wallet... More
Customers of Canadian carrier Rogers can now add a range of merchant gift cards, managed by prepaid card provider Blackhawk Network, to their Suretap NFC mobile wallets... More
“Host card emulation is good for the NFC ecosystem as a whole, but remains immature, unstandardised and, relative to secure element based deployments, vulnerable to malicious attack,” says SIM card manufacturer association SIMalliance, which has published an HCE discussion paper called Secure Element Deployment & Host Card Emulation... More
Equity Bank, Kenya’s largest bank, is to provide more than 300,000 free NFC phones to retailers across the country for use as POS devices, ITWeb Africa reports... More
Transport for London (TfL) is testing payments via NFC phones for use on the tube and the overground rail network and is piloting contactless card payments with some 5,000 volunteers... More
Finnish carrier Elisa has introduced reloadable NFC payment stickers that are available to purchase from the R-Kioski convenience store chain pre-loaded with €20 of value... More
Australia’s Westpac bank is to launch its NFC mobile payments service on Samsung Galaxy S4 and S5 devices “over the next few weeks” with the functionality being “rolled out progressively” from this month. By 2015, the bank predicts, three million Australians will be using NFC to make payments. More
NBS Technologies has added support for host card emulation (HCE) to its Xpressi Trusted Service Manager (TSM) platform, enabling customers to deploy both Visa PayWave and MasterCard PayPass NFC services in the cloud... More
Mobile network operator Claro and one of Brazil’s largest banks, Bradesco, are to commercially launch an NFC mobile payments service in the state of São Paulo during the first half of this year, ahead of a national rollout that will reach a combined customer base of 85 million consumers... More