Barclaycard is to shut down its first generation bPay prepaid contactless wristband at the end of the month and will launch “a newly designed wristband that’s lighter, slimmer and comes in a choice of colours… in a couple of months”... More
Archive for May 2015
AMS picks up award for NFC chip
AMS has won a Sesames award in the emerging payments category at Cartes America for its AS39230 BoostedNFC IC, the chip used by Apple in its iPhone 6 and Apple Watch devices... More
Home Depot to accept Apple Pay in 2,000 stores
US retail giant Home Depot is planning to offer Apple Pay at its more than 2,000 stores, a rollout that would make it the largest retailer yet to accept the mobile payments service — though a deal with Apple is not yet in place... More
O2 buys out Weve partners and drops mobile payment plans
O2, one of the three UK mobile network operators that formed the mobile commerce joint venture Weve three years ago, has bought out partners EE and Vodafone to operate the brand as a wholly-owned subsidiary — and has confirmed to NFC World that it has abandoned Weve’s mobile payment ambitions... More
“iPad Pro” to include NFC?
Apple is rumoured to be working on a larger iPad which will include NFC, potentially turning the tablet into an Apple Pay POS terminal... More
Qualcomm and NXP team up for NFC on Snapdragon platforms
Qualcomm Technologies is working with NXP to integrate NXP’s NFC and embedded secure element (eSE) solutions into reference designs for its Snapdragon 800, 600, 400 and 200 processor-based platforms, mobile chipsets which already lie at the heart of more than one billion devices... More
NFC gets top marks for helping Barcelona kids get to school
Six schools in Barcelona are issuing contactless cards to students who use public transport so that parents can track them on their journey to school and be notified when their child has arrived safely... More
Apple Watch carries NFC components from NXP and AMS
A teardown of the Apple Watch shows a design centred on a custom processor with NFC components from NXP and AMS, ABI Research has revealed... More
Tattoos confound Apple Watch wrist detection, making Apple Pay “unusable”
Apple Watch owners with tattooed wrists have been reporting that their smartwatches are not functioning properly as the LED-based heart monitor built into the devices experiences difficulty detecting that the watch is being worn — an issue which impacts the use of Apple Pay among other features such as receiving notifications, placing phone calls and using some applications. More
84% of banks and retailers plan to invest in mobile payment technology
The “overwhelming majority” of financial institutions and retailers are currently investing or planning to invest in new payment technologies within the next 18 to 24 months, with online (86%) and mobile payment technologies (84%) topping the list, a survey by payments provider ACI and IT consultants Ovum has found... More
92% of UK mobile users to make a mobile payment in 2015
More than 31m UK mobile users (92%) will make a payment using their mobile device in 2015, multichannel sales specialist Oxygen8 has found... More
Chip and PIN faces slow take-up in US, says Forrester
EMV payments on plastic cards won’t achieve broad adoption in the US until 2020, Forrester Research predicts, due to the rise of “more secure” mobile and contactless payment alternatives... More
Digital Insights adds Touch ID to banking apps
Digital banking solutions provider Digital Insight is to offer Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint verification in the iOS mobile banking applications it supplies to financial institutions later this year... More
Yandex offers mobile payments at 1,300 Ukraine fuel stations
Ukrainian drivers can now pay for fuel at more than 1,300 outlets across the country using a mobile payment service launched by Russian internet company Yandex, in partnership with PrivatBank and MasterCard... More
Tencent’s mobile OS to offer payments
Chinese internet giant Tencent has released a mobile operating system that is set to include mobile payments functionality... More