Ticket holders attending concerts and other events at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Denver in the US state of Colorado can now gain entry to the entertainment venue by scanning their palm rather than their mobile ticket or ID... More
California has released the code for both the front end and middle tier of its Digital Covid-19 Vaccine Record into the public domain to enable other US states to deploy their own digital vaccination record systems more quickly... More
Two-fifths of US consumers (40%) still prefer to use cash and just under 40% of US businesses (39%) maintain a cash-only policy for purchases of less than US$20 “despite the availability of technology-driven forms of payment such as credit cards, debit cards and mobile wallets,” a survey by a division of WSFS Bank has found... More
Apple users in the US states of Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma and Utah will soon be able to store and present digital versions of their driving licence and state ID documents on an NFC-enabled iPhone and Apple Watch... More
The US Consumer Brands Association (CBA) has released an operational standard that will enable shippers, carriers, logistics companies and retailers to implement contactless pickup and delivery workflows across their supply chains... More
Hawaiian motorists can now use a mobile app to find vacant parking spaces and then pay for their spot by tapping a contactless ‘smart station’ with their NFC smartphone... More
The number of debit transactions completed using a mobile wallet in the US rose by 51% year-on-year to approximately 2bn in 2020, with “a noteworthy” 92% of those transactions being made with Apple Pay and just 5% with Google Pay and 3% with Samsung Pay, according to research published in the 2021 Debit Issuer Study... More
San Diego’s Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) in the US state of California is rolling out an account-based contactless ticketing system that will let passengers pay their public transit fares with a physical or digital transit card and have those fares capped to a maximum of the price of a daily or monthly pass... More
Students at the University of New Brunswick and Sheridan College will be the first in Canada to be able to store their digital student ID on their iPhone or Apple Watch and use it to gain access to buildings and make purchases this coming academic year, Apple has announced... More
Amazon is promoting its Amazon One in-store biometric access and payments system by offering customers US$10 credit when they register their palm to gain access to and make payments in stores equipped with the company’s contactless palm scanning technology... More
Starbucks customers have accumulated a total unspent balance of US$1.628bn on the company’s prepaid physical and digital reward and gift cards, the coffee giant’s 2021 Q3 earnings call has revealed... More
Passengers travelling on express bus services in the Santa Barbara region of the US state of California can now pay their fares by tapping an on-board payment reader with their contactless debit, credit, prepaid card or mobile wallet... More
The total value of contactless card transactions worldwide will reach US$2.5tn in 2021, up from US$1.7tn in 2020, Juniper Research predicts. The researchers also forecast that card payments will retain “the majority share of overall contactless transaction values at 79% in 2021”. More
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the US have developed fabric-friendly NFC sensors that can be woven into the surface of everyday objects such as cushions and pillows and enable them to locate other objects and sense a human presence... More
Google Pay users with an NFC-enabled Android smartphone in the US can now request a virtual debit card that allows them to make in-store contactless payments directly from their Google Pay balance... More
More than four fifths of consumers (81%) worldwide are ready to use a biometric payment card and authenticate payments with their fingerprint rather than a PIN code, according to a survey commissioned by a biometric technology provider... More
Passengers on New York’s subway and bus services have now tapped their contactless bank card, smartphone or wearable device to pay fares using the Omny open loop fare payment system more than 100m times since its launch in May 2019, double the total of 50m the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) reported in March this year... More
Google Pay has updated its Passes API to enable healthcare organisations, government agencies and other authorised bodies to create digital Covid-19 vaccination and test result certificates that Android users can store and display directly on their mobile device even if they have not installed the Google Pay app... More
South East Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) in the US is planning to upgrade or replace its SEPTA Key transit card system in order to offer passengers on its bus, trolley and rail networks in the Greater Philadelphia region a wider range of transit ticketing options... More
Scientists at Northwestern and George Washington universities in the US have developed a wireless, battery-free implantable pacemaker that uses NFC to harvest energy from an external antenna and dissolves after it is no longer needed to control a patient’s heartbeat... More