Corporate customers of US Bank can now send a digital corporate card directly to an employee, contractor, volunteer or customer’s mobile phone, enabling them to instantly begin charging online and in-store purchases to the company — subject to a strict spending limit and expiration date... More
South Africa’s Nedbank has become the first bank in Africa to enable merchants to accept contactless payments on standard NFC phones... More
The UK’s NatWest bank has launched Payit, an online payments service that uses open banking to make it possible for merchants to accept payments directly from consumers’ bank accounts... More
Sixteen major European banks have announced plans to jointly create a new company that will be tasked with delivering “a seamless, competitive and unified payment solution” for in-store, online and P2P payments across Europe... More
7-Eleven is running a pilot of a new mobile payments service that includes an option for iPhone owners to use Siri to pay for their fuel from their vehicle using only their voice... More
Visa has announced that it has now issued more than 1bn tokens through its Visa Token Service (VTS) and there are now more than 8,200 issuers using the service in 150 markets around the world... More
Customers of Belgium’s KBC bank can now add their debit card to their choice of a range of wearables and then use their new ring, watch, keyring or bracelet to make payments at any merchant equipped to accept contactless payments... More
BNP Paribas is to begin issuing payment cards with a built-in fingerprint sensor to its Premier and Gold cardholders later this year, the French bank has announced... More
Brazil’s central bank has “ordered Visa and Mastercard to suspend the start of activities or immediately stop using the WhatsApp application to initiate payments and transfers”... More
Rail passengers using Eurostar services to travel between London and continental Europe are set to be the first to use a new face verification system to board their train “without showing a ticket or passport”... More
Apple iPhone users will be able to lock, unlock and start vehicles using a new NFC CarKey feature from next month, Apple has announced, with BMW the first vehicle manufacturer to add support for the new service... More
NatWest is working on the development of a behavioural biometrics solution for Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) that could be used as a replacement for banking passwords, the UK bank has announced... More
Consumer-facing solutions and programmes based on EMVCo’s Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) specifications are now to be known as Click to Pay, the standards body has announced... More
Visa has introduced a new cloud-based token framework that makes it possible for tokens to be enabled “across all of a consumer’s devices” and “are directly integrated with the consumer’s bank”... More
WhatsApp users in Brazil can now make payments to local merchants and send money to friends and contacts “without leaving their chat”... More
Google is working on “a major overhaul” of Google Pay that will see the service expanding into “a one-stop portal for commerce”, The Information reports... More
PARTNER NEWS: European mobile loyalty wallet leader Stocard has added support for NFC payments to its app as it looks to evolve its digital wallet into an all-in-one payments, banking and shopping service... More
The European Commission has opened a formal antitrust investigation “to assess whether Apple’s conduct in connection with Apple Pay violates EU competition rules”... More
Canada’s DCBank has partnered with technology supplier XTM to provide shopping malls and entertainment venues with ‘reverse ATMs’ that let customers instantly convert their physical money into a prepaid Mastercard they can then use to make payments at cashless points of sale... More
Russian grocery retailer Azbuka Vkusa has converted an aisle within one of its Moscow supermarkets to a cashierless store-within-a store, enabling shoppers to use their mobile phone to check in at the entrance to the aisle, add their shopping to their basket and “simply exit when done”... More
