American Express is to launch a US$10m Small Merchant EMV Assistance Program in February 2015 to drive adoption of EMV... More
EMV
MasterCard backs Zwipe fingerprint payment card
MasterCard has partnered with Zwipe, maker of a contactless payment card that includes an integrated fingerprint biometric sensor, for the commercial launch of the technology following a pilot with Norway’s Sparebanken DIN. More
CaixaBank rolls out contactless wristbands across Spain
Spain’s CaixaBank is making contactless wristbands available to customers at all of its branches, enabling customers to make payments at any of the more than 300,000 contactless terminals in Spain by simply touching the band to a merchant’s POS device... More
MasterCard launches MDES token platform for mobile payments
MasterCard has announced US availability of a token platform that enables card issuers to store tokenized versions of their customers’ card details on Apple’s new NFC devices as well as NFC phones and tablets from a range of other manufacturers... More
iPhone, NFC and Apple Pay: How should banks react?
PARTNER VIEWS: The launch of Apple Pay “is good news for US iPhone users who want to ‘tap to pay’,” Martin Cox, global head of sales at Bell ID, writes in a blog post... More
iPhone 6 to ship with NFC and support for Apple Pay mobile payments
UPDATED The new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus will include support for NFC, Apple has announced. The NFC functionality will let users make Apple Pay mobile payments in stores. More
Walmart moves to EMV
Walmart MasterCard holders are to receive a replacement card “in the next few weeks” that includes an EMV chip... More
US to get 575m chip cards next year
More than 575million EMV payment cards will have been issued by the end of 2015 by nine leading US card issuers who are members of the Payments Security Task Force (PST), an organisation set up in March 2014 “to drive executive level discussion that will enhance payments system security”... More
US merchant groups call for creation of open tokenization standards
Leading merchant groups in the US have come together to call for the creation of an alternative set of open standards for tokenized payments that would be managed by an independent body such as ISO or ANSI — rather than by the payments industry. More
Square unveils EMV card reader
Mobile POS provider Square is to introduce a new card reader that can be used to process both EMV chip card and magnetic stripe card payments... More
Visa to launch new payments service in September, Apple could be the first customer
Visa has unveiled a suite of services designed to “facilitate secure payments across a broad range of internet-connected devices and wearables”... More
Consult Hyperion demos EMV mobile payments over BLE on an iPhone
UK payments technology specialist Consult Hyperion has unveiled a proof-of-concept solution that uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and host card emulation (HCE) to enable both iPhone and Android NFC phone owners to make MasterCard, Visa and other open loop EMV payments at the point of sale... More
Survey finds American cardholders are ready for EMV
Almost 70% of Americans believe that EMV chip technology makes their debit and credit card transactions more secure, with only 5% feeling chip cards make their transactions less secure, a new survey released by NXP Semiconductors has revealed... More
JCB to launch NFC payments in 2015
Japan-based payments network JCB is to begin testing a contactless payments service in Tokyo this month, ahead of a commercial rollout in 2015... More
Aite reports on US migration to EMV
Some 70% of US credit cards and 41% of debit cards will be EMV enabled by the end of 2015, according to a new Aite Group report, but the majority will be contact cards rather than dual interface cards that also support contactless payments... More
Edgetech to offer acoustic mobile payments in Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe-based banking solutions provider Edgetech Solutions is preparing to launch a new mobile payment service that uses sound-based communication technology from NearBytes to let people make payments in stores with their phones... More
FIS offers instant EMV cards
Banking and payments technology provider FIS has launched a cloud-based service that lets banks instantly issue EMV ‘chip and pin’ or magnetic stripe cards to customers in their branches... More
Apple upgrades its mPOS
Apple is to equip US store staff with a new version of its EasyPay mPOS solution that replaces the existing iPod devices with an iPhone 5S, encased in a Verifone shell, that offers support for both EMV “chip and pin” cards and contactless payments, Forbes reports... More
PayPal takes another look at NFC
The arrival of host card emulation (HCE) has led to a re-think of online payments giant PayPal’s famously anti-NFC point of view, company president David Marcus has revealed... More
Aconite adds HCE and EMV token support
EMV and NFC payment software specialist Aconite has added support for host card emulation (HCE) and EMV tokenization to its product offering, enabling issuers to “operate an HCE and token-enabled service, including real-time data preparation, distributed EMV transaction processing, remote CVM management and mapping risk scores to card/token profiles.”... More