Passengers using bus services across 33 cities and islands in Greece will soon be able to make contactless fare payments for their journeys using their own locally issued or international credit, debit or prepaid card... More
Passengers travelling on domestic flights operated by Aegean Airlines and its subsidiary Olympic Air in Greece can now verify their identity when boarding using government-issued digital ID credentials stored on their Apple or Android smartphone rather than a physical ID card or passport... More
More than eight in ten payment terminals worldwide now accept contactless payments (82%) as the number of outlets accepting card payments globally grew by 2% in 2021 to reach 88m and the number of eftpos terminals increased by 5% to reach 134m, according to research from RBR... More
More than 710,000 Greek citizens have used the Greek government’s Gov.gr Wallet app to create and store a digital version of their national identity card on their smartphone and more than 563,000 have used it to generate a digital version of their driving licence since the service went live last month... More
Norway, Finland and New Zealand are the three countries closest to becoming cashless societies, followed by Hong Kong, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, the UK, Singapore and the Netherlands, according to research published by Merchant Machine... More
Greek citizens can now create, store and present digital versions of their national identity card and driving licence using a digital identity wallet on their smartphone... More
Google has begun rolling out a multipurpose digital wallet that enables users to store, use and present digital credentials such as identity cards and health passes as well as payment cards, transit and event tickets and hotel keys in 39 countries across Europe, the Americas and Asia... More
Greek citizens will soon be able to download and store digital versions of their full identity card and driving licence on their mobile phone, according to the country’s digital governance minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis... More
A “growing number” of Europeans would support the creation of national digital currencies with the specific aim of asserting “some monetary independence” from the European Union, according to a survey commissioned by Euronews... More
Google Pay has officially launched its app for owners of both Android smartphones and Wear OS smartwatches in Austria. Austrian customers of neobanks and fintechs including Curve, Monese, N26, Revolut and Viva Wallet have been able to use Google Pay via their mobile banking app since November 2020. More
Eesti Pank, the central bank of Estonia, has tested a blockchain-powered technical solution for the use of a digital euro central bank digital currency (CBDC) that it says is capable of handling more than 300,000 simultaneous payments a second and enables payees to receive a payment in less than two seconds... More
Seven European countries — Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece and Poland — have begun issuing the European Union’s Digital Covid Certificate one month ahead of the full 1 July rollout announced last week... More
PARTNER NEWS: Greece’s Alpha Bank has launched a new version of its myAlpha NFC payments wallet that makes use of Antelop Solutions’ NFC white label SDK to add support for the latest Visa VTS and Mastercard MDES tokenization innovations... More
PARTNER NEWS: Piraeus Bank has launched an NFC mobile payments service that uses Antelop Solutions’ digital card and tokenization platform to let customers digitize their Mastercard or Visa cards and make payments from directly within their mobile banking app... More
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
PayPal users in 28 countries across the world are now able to use their PayPal app to make QR code-based mobile payments in stores — and standard seller transaction fees are being waived “for a limited time” for merchants using the new functionality... More
Updated 30 January 2023 Countries around the world are increasing the contactless transaction limit in a bid to lower cash usage to combat the spread of Covid-19... More
Mastercard is now working with 29 countries across Europe and central Asia to implement increases to their contactless payment transaction limit, the payments network says... More
The spending limit for contactless card payments in the UK is being increased from £30 (US$35.33) to £45 (US$52.99), UK Finance has announced. The new spending limit will begin to roll out from 1 April 2020. More
European supermarket group Ahold Delhaize is to equip its stores in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece, Czech Republic, Serbia and Romania with NFC-enabled electronic shelf edge labels that shoppers can tap to obtain more information about a product — and then add the items to their shopping basket so that they can self-checkout on their mobile phone... More
