Theatregoers on New York’s Broadway can now get information about the show they are seeing and receive offers from local restaurants, bars and other venues via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons and the Playbill Passport app. The app has been developed by technology company Broadway Voice and Playbill magazine while the beacons have been supplied by Gimbal and are used in conjunction with Urban Airship’s mobile marketing platform... More
Archive for January 2016
Irish transit users get NFC top-ups
Travellers in Ireland can now top up their Leap public transport card by tapping it against their NFC phone and entering their payment details... More
Chicago commuters make 1m mobile journeys
The Ventra mobile ticketing app introduced by Chicago’s Metra commuter rail service in November 2015 has been used by passengers on more than one million journeys in its first two months... More
Apple Pay adds 51 US banks
Apple has added another 51 banks and credit unions to its list of Apple Pay supporting financial institutions in the US... More
A third of US consumers now use mobile wallets
Nearly a third of US consumers (32%) are currently using a mobile wallet such as Apple Pay or Android Pay, research from Vibes reveals... More
Swiss banks add support for Paymit mobile payments
Paymit, the P2P transfer service set up by Switzerland’s SIX, UBS and Zürcher Kantonalbank, has added support from three more banks ahead of its launch as an in-store mobile payment solution in February 2016... More
Otto Group to offer PowaTag mobile payments
German retail giant Otto Group has partnered with Powa Technologies to offer its customers mobile payments through PowaTag, a service that lets consumers make purchases by capturing ‘PowaTags’ using their mobile device... More
Alipay reports 65% share of China’s online payments market
Nearly two thirds (65%) of online payments in China were made through Alipay last year, findings published by the mobile payments provider and reported by ECNS reveal... More
Swatch and Visa to take Bellamy smartwatch to Rio Olympics
Visitors to this summer’s Rio 2016 Olympics will be able to use luxury watchmaker Swatch’s Bellamy NFC smartwatch to pay for event passes, according to the Financial Times... More
Starbucks sees rise in US mobile transactions
Some 22% of all US transactions in Starbucks during December were made using mobile apps, up from 21% in November 2015, the company’s Kevin Johnson reported during the coffee chain’s first quarter earnings call. “Over one million customers in the US used Mobile Order & Pay capability in the month of December and those customers averaged approximately five mobile orders in the month,” Johnson added... More
Apple Pay leads US mobile payments market
Apple Pay is “overwhelmingly the share leader” in point-of-sale mobile payments across the US despite uptake remaining relatively low, the latest statistics from Piper Jaffray’s Apple Pay adoption tracker show... More
Barclaycard reports 164% increase in contactless transactions for 2015
The value of payments made using a Barclaycard contactless card increased by 164% in 2015 compared to the year before, the UK card issuer has revealed, while the average transaction value increased by 26% to £8.65 (US$12.40)... More
Samsung Pay to let South Koreans pay in China and US
Samsung Pay users in South Korea will soon be able to make payments in China and the US using cards issued by South Korean card companies... More
UK contactless payments hit £1bn record in November 2015
Contactless payments in the UK hit a record £1.02bn (US$1.45bn) in a single month for the first time in November 2015, increasing from £287m in January that year, The UK Cards Association reveals. The number of contactless purchases in November totalled 128m while the average transaction value increased to £8.03, up from £7.72 in October... More
ZTE won’t launch its own mobile payment service
Handset maker ZTE has revealed that it will not be launching its own mobile payment service... More
Samsung Pay to go live in Spain with CaixaBank
Customers of Spain’s CaixaBank will be the first in the country to be able to use Samsung Pay, following a partnership between the bank and Samsung that will see the mobile payment service added as an option to CaixaBank’s host card emulation (HCE) based mobile payment app. More
Jetco to launch P2P payments with 12 Hong Kong banks
Hong Kong ATM network Jetco has partnered with 12 banks to offer Jetco Pay P2P, a service that will let customers transfer funds using the recipient’s mobile number... More
One in six Koreans use mobile to pay in-store and online
One in six South Korean consumers (15.8%) have used a mobile to pay for in-store or online purchases, research by The Bank of Korea shows... More
Amazon lets customers order consumables directly from connected devices
Consumers can now automatically replenish consumables for physical goods around their home using Amazon’s Dash Replenishment Service (DRS), a new program that works with a wide range of home appliances, medical monitoring equipment and computer printers. More
Gemalto supplies NFC SIMs to Russian carriers for transit ticketing in Moscow
PARTNER NEWS: Digital security giant Gemalto is supplying Russian mobile network operators MegaFon and VimpelCom with UpTeq Multi-Tenant NFC SIMs that allow the carriers’ subscribers to board metro trains, trams and buses across Moscow using their NFC phones and the Troika transport card mobile app... More