Samsung has begun inviting Galaxy phone owners in India to register for early access to Samsung Pay. Customers can opt to pre-register Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Standard Chartered Bank debit or credit cards and SBI Cards credit cards today with support for American Express and Citibank to follow. Paytm’s market leading mobile wallet will also be supported by the service. More
China’s third-party mobile payments market reached RMB 9,041.9 billion (US$ 1314.23 billion) in size during Q3 2016, a quarter on quarter increase of 20.5%, according to research published by China-based Analysys... More
Apple CEO Tim Cook told attendees at the company’s annual shareholder meeting this week that Apple Pay “hit an air pocket” this year with adoption in the US trailing other countries, such as China and Australia, where NFC is more broadly available, AppleInsider reports from the event... More
Apple is promoting adoption of Apple Pay in Japan via a two month campaign that offers a wide range of rewards and benefits to consumers who choose to use the NFC payments service. More
The number of mobile transactions as a percentage of all in-store transactions has grown by 247% in the UK over the last year, analysis of transaction data and a consumer survey conducted by payments processor Worldpay has found. Workers paying for lunch on the go and payments for drinks in bars are the main drivers of the increase in transaction volume. More
Visa’s mVisa QR-based mobile payment service is now live in India, Kenya and Rwanda and will soon be available in Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Vietnam, the company has announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona... More
A third of all transactions processed by PayPal are now conducted using a mobile device, PayPal COO Bill Ready has revealed, with the company processing more than US$31bn in mobile payments in the fourth quarter of 2016 — up 53% from the same period in 2015... More
Huawei has unveiled a new smartwatch at Mobile World Congress that supports NFC payments... More
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has conducted trial runs of a prototype cryptocurrency it has been developing since 2014 that could be used “to buy anything from noodles to a car”, The Straits Times reports... More
PARTNER NEWS: A new embedded secure element and NFC solution from NXP will make it possible for mobile transactions to be conducted at the same speed as contactless card transactions... More
Toy maker Mattel has unveiled an NFC-enabled, voice-activated artificial intelligence assistant for children... More
The NFC World team is pleased to announce that we have a new editor, Christopher Brown, who is joining us from BBC News... More
An update to the EMV 3-D Secure specification means both biometrics and one-time passcodes can now be used to add security to card-not-present transactions... More
A digital assistant that makes use of artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and cognitive messaging is to be built into Bank of America’s mobile app from next year... More
Apple Pay is now live in Japan, enabling local iPhone and Apple Watch users to make payments in stores and on public transportation services that support the widely used Sony FeliCa-based Japanese NFC payments system... More
Chinese mobile payments giant Alipay is expanding its presence in US and European retail stores via a deal with POS maker Verifone... More
Google has launched a virtual reality headset that works in conjunction with smartphones supporting its Daydream mobile VR platform and uses NFC to connect the devices... More
Customers of Priorbank in Belarus can now make mobile payments using a new HCE service that supports MasterCard and will be extended to include Visa cards later this year... More
Amazon has launched the Amazon Payments Partner Program, a new service designed to enable ecommerce platform providers and developers to offer merchants Amazon Payments, which allows customers to log in and pay using their account with the online retail giant... More
UK supermarket giant Tesco’s PayQwiq mobile payments service, which lets customers pay using an Android or Apple phone by snapping an image of a QR code located at each checkout, is now live in 524 of the retailer’s stores in London and Edinburgh... More