Contactless payments accounted for more than half of all transactions made with payment cards in Hungary in 2016, the country’s central bank says... More
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Square says ‘back end change’ brought down mPOS service
Mobile POS provider Square has blamed a “change we made to one of our back-end systems” for a service outage which affected payments and other services earlier this week... More
PrivatBank adds Mastercard to HCE payments
Ukraine’s PrivatBank has now made host card emulation (HCE) based mobile payments available for its Mastercard cardholders, using the Mastercard Digital Enablement Service (MDES)... More
ING offers Mastercard HCE payments in Poland
Mastercard cardholders at Polish bank ING Bank Śląski can now make host card emulation (HCE) based mobile payments using a ‘Mastercard on the Phone’ feature inside the My ING app... More
Safe mobile recharge service for women to roll out across India
PARTNER NEWS: A service to improve women’s safety, by allowing them to recharge their prepaid mobile account at any retail outlet with a private code generated by SMS rather than their phone number, will roll out across India later this month... More
Wearable payments platform to be tested on three continents
A digital cash service allowing consumers — including those without bank accounts — to load money onto a range of wearable items and make contactless payments in retail outlets will roll out across “eight or nine countries” in North America, Europe and Africa from April 2017... More
Smart posters and clothes piggyback on FM signals to talk to phones and car radios
A technique to develop smart posters and clothing, which communicate directly with car radios or smartphones by using background FM radio signals to transform them into mini FM radio stations consuming virtually zero power, has been unveiled by a University of Washington (UW) team... More
India calls for mobile banking for all by 31 March
The Indian government has called on banks to provide mobile banking to all customers by the start of April 2017, The Indian Express reports... More
Millennials not giving up on cash and checks
Millennials have “one foot firmly planted in both the future and the past” when it comes to mobile payments, a study by Accel and Qualtrics says... More
Nordea launches PSD2-inspired Open Banking portal
Nordic bank Nordea has launched the first version of its Open Banking/Open API portal, offering third-party developers the chance to collaborate with the bank as part of the requirements laid out by the European Payment Services Directive (PSD2)... More
Wristbands for contactless payments given away at MWC
Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) and Spain’s CaixaBank have distributed prepaid wristbands to visitors to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona which let them make contactless payments... More
Pizza Hut unveils pizza-ordering shoes
Pizza Hut has unveiled a pair of shoes with a button that lets wearers order pizza and get it delivered... More
Mobile World Congress survey: IoT and mobile payments ‘biggest business opportunities’ for 2017
The Internet of Things (IoT) is seen as the biggest business opportunity of 2017 by nearly half of visitors and exhibitors at Mobile World Congress surveyed by the GSMA (48.2%), followed by mobile payments (14.5%) and artificial intelligence (14%). More
EcoCash and Mahindra win GSMA best mobile payments solution award
PARTNER NEWS: Zimbabwean mobile payments service EcoCash, powered by Mahindra Comviva’s Mobiquity Money platform, has been named Best Mobile Payment Solution at the Mobile World Congress Glomo Awards... More
NXP signs deals to add NFC to cars
PARTNER NEWS: Five “leading car OEMs” are to integrate NFC technology from NXP into cars to enable a variety of secure interactions including vehicle access, Bluetooth and WiFi pairing, personalization and payments, the chip maker has announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona... More
More than 500m people now have a mobile money account
Over half a billion mobile money accounts have been registered in 92 countries, with 1.3bn transactions processed in December 2016 alone, research from GSMA reveals... More
Mahindra Comviva adds offers and promotions to mobile money platform
PARTNER NEWS: Mahindra Comviva is making it possible for mobile money operators to increase user engagement with the addition of a new service that enables relevant offers and promotions to be delivered automatically to users’ mobile devices... More
Mastercard adds bar tab feature to Qkr! mobile payments app
Mastercard has unveiled a new feature for its Qkr... More
Google Assistant comes to more Android phones
Google Assistant will be made available to all phones running Android 7.0 Nougat and Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating systems, Reuters reports... More
GSMA predicts 1.1bn 5G connections by 2025
The GSMA forecasts there will be 1.1bn 5G mobile connections by 2025, with 5G networks providing one in eight of all mobile connections and driving “massive rollout of intelligent IoT nodes for a multitude of scenarios”... More
