Google Pay has gone live in Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Portugal and Romania with support for Mastercard and Visa cards issued by participating banks and card issuers... More
Archive for November 2020
RBR: 100m merchants worldwide to accept card payments by end 2025
The number of outlets worldwide accepting card payments will reach nearly 100m by the end of 2025, an increase driven by government initiatives to promote cashless payments and by an acceleration in the move to contactless payments during the Covid-19 pandemic, research from RBR predicts... More
TfL to integrate Oyster and contactless fare payment systems
Transport for London (TfL) is planning to integrate the back office systems for its Oyster transit card and contactless fare payment services as well as replace validation readers across its entire transport network from 2025... More
JCB reports 30% rise in contactless payments volumes
The number of contactless transactions made by some 140 million JCB cardholders across 24 markets increased by more than 30% between July 2019 and July this year, the Tokyo-based payments network reports in a new white paper... More
Standard Bank to support contactless payments in 15 African countries
Standard Bank is supporting the mass rollout of contactless cards across Africa as the financial services group reports an accelerated increase in the use of tap and pay across the continent... More
Regional Transit Service integrates transit tickets into mobility-as-a-service app
Passengers using Regional Transit Service (RTS) buses in the US city of Rochester can now plan their journeys, get real-time updates, connect to third-party mobility services and make tap-and-ride fare payments from within a single mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) app... More
Pandemic spurs half of US shoppers to try mobile contactless payments
More than half (53%) of today’s shoppers have used a mobile contactless payment option for the first time since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a survey by USA-based Inmar Intelligence... More
Facebook digital currency researchers publish ultra high-speed payments paper
A digital transaction settlement system being developed by researchers working on Facebook’s Novi cryptocurrency digital wallet app could support up to 160,000 transactions per second, “about 7x the peak transaction rate of the Visa payments network”, according to a paper published by the research team... More
Lebanon to issue digital currency in 2021
Banque du Liban, the central bank of Lebanon, is preparing to launch a central bank digital currency (CBDC) next year, the bank’s governor Riad Salameh has told a meeting of the Lebanese Depositors Association... More
More than 500m iPhone users have now activated Apple Pay
The number of iPhone users globally that have activated Apple Pay has grown by 66m over the past year, from 441m in September 2019 to 507m in September 2020, according to a study published by Loup Ventures... More
China to maintain central database of all digital currency transactions
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) will keep a database of all transactions made using the digital yuan, China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), according to China Daily... More
JR East to offer extra loyalty points to transit card users travelling off-peak
Commuters on JR East train services in the Tokyo metropolitan area who pay for their tickets using a commuter pass stored on their Suica transit card will receive additional JRE loyalty points for travelling outside peak times from March 2021... More
Saudi Arabia reports ‘phenomenal’ increase in NFC mobile payments
NFC mobile payments accounted for 25% of overall POS transaction volumes in Saudi Arabia in September, Saudi Payments reports... More
Nottingham begins rollout of multi-operator contactless ticketing system
Nottingham City Transport (NCT) has become the first transportation operator in the UK city to roll out Nottingham Contactless, a multi-operator ticketing system that lets passengers use open-loop debit and credit cards and NFC mobile phones to pay for fares across multiple transportation operators... More
Juniper: Payments from smart home devices will top US$164bn by 2025
The total global transaction value of purchases made using smart home devices is expected to rise from US$22bn this year to more than US$164bn in 2025, according to Juniper Research... More
Nottingham adds NFC top ups to Robin Hood transit card
Public transport users in Nottingham, UK, can now buy credit or an extension to their season ticket with their NFC mobile phone and then transfer it to their multi-operator Robin Hood transit card by simply tapping their card to their NFC device... More
EMVCo, Fido and W3C explain how their technologies can be combined to streamline ecommerce payments
Payment standards body EMVCo, the Fido Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have published a document that explains how their technical specifications can be used to enable more secure and convenient card-based ecommerce transactions... More
Spanish banks to launch digital ID platform
Spanish consumers are set to be able to self-manage their digital identity on their mobile device using a blockchain-enabled platform being developed by a consortium of 10 companies that includes leading Spanish banks Banco Santander, Bankia, CaixaBank, and Liberbank... More
Brazil begins rollout of Pix national instant payments platform
Pix, Brazil’s instant payment scheme, has gone live in a “restricted operation phase” prior to full implementation later this month, the Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) has revealed... More
Apple Pay to go live in Israel
Israeli payment services provider Isracard has become the first financial company in the country to announce that it is to enable cardholders with an iPhone to make payments using Apple Pay... More