Facebook has unveiled a unified payments service designed to provide “a convenient, secure and consistent payment experience across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp”... More
Visa has made “a financial injection” in Lisnr, a US startup that is using ultrasonic data transmission as an alternative to NFC and QR codes for mobile payments... More
The Salvation Army is adding NFC chips to all 25,000 of its iconic Red Kettles for its Christmas 2019 fundraising campaign, enabling shoppers to simply tap their Apple or Android NFC phone to make a donation to the charity... More
Discover is to begin issuing contactless payment cards “for most” of its Discover It and Discover More cardmembers “who need cards reissued or replaced” this month and, from December, will start issuing contactless cards to new Discover cardholders... More
Apple Pay revenue and transactions have “more than doubled year-over-year with over 3bn transactions in the September quarter, exceeding PayPal’s number of transactions and growing four times as fast,” Apple CEO Tim Cook has revealed... More
China remains the country with by far the highest mobile payments adoption rate, with 81.1% of smartphone owners making use of the technology, eMarketer reports... More
Three in ten US smartphone owners now use a mobile payments app to make payments in stores — and Apple Pay is now the most popular with 30.3 million users, according to new research by eMarketer... More
US fast food restaurant giant Chick-fil-A has launched a mobile ordering service that lets customers place food orders with their mobile phone and then tap a numbered NFC tag on their table to confirm where they are sitting so that their meal can be brought directly to their seat... More
Shoppers at 30 US supermarkets operated by Netherlands-based retail giant Ahold Delhaize will be able to use their mobile phone to scan items as they shop and then self-checkout and pay by the end of this year... More
American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Visa have gone live with an online checkout service that lets merchants add a single buy button to their sites to accept payments from any of the networks’ cardholders — without them first needing to create an account with the merchant or enter detailed payment data... More
PARTNER NEWS: Cilab’s ci230 high-speed testing suite has made it possible for self-service payments leader Invenco to significantly improve the time it takes to develop, test and bring to market EMV-compliant NFC payment terminals for its customers, chief engineer Chris Henry has told NFC World... More
PARTNER NEWS: Food giant Kraft Heinz is using tamper resistant NXP NFC tags for an innovative marketing campaign that lets customers tap their NFC phone to a tag incorporated into product packaging for a chance to win a gift card — but only if they have first purchased the product and opened the packet... More
A new deal between Google and Cubic Transportation Systems is set to make it possible for public transport users in a number of major cities around the world to use Google Pay to add their transit card to their NFC mobile phone... More
Public transportation operators from across the US state of Ohio have gone live with EZfare, a new service that lets passengers use a single mobile ticketing app to buy tickets and passes from any of the participating operators... More
A major investigation into US consumers’ attitudes to mobile payments has found that concerns over how well they would be protected against loss should an issue arise is now the major barrier to widespread adoption of the technology... More
Samsung Pay users in the US are now able to send international money transfers from within the mobile payments app — and use a new Samsung Pay Cash account to make payments in stores and online “right from the Samsung Pay app”... More
A new store in the largest shopping and entertainment complex in North America has opened as a testbed for the latest retail technologies — and products on sale have been equipped with NFC tags... More
There are now more than 200 million users of the UnionPay mobile payments app, the China-based payments network reports, and more than 3m merchants outside mainland China now accept UnionPay mobile payments... More
Amazon is in talks to bring its cashierless Go technology to airports and movie theaters — CNBC — “Amazon is in talks to bring the cashierless technology that runs its Go stores to other retailers like airport shops and movie theatres, according to people familiar with the matter… The idea is to start installing the technology working for customers in the first quarter of 2020 and have hundreds of these stores working by the end of 2020, two of the people said. One person said Amazon hopes to have the upgrade process take just two weeks.”
New York Mets fans attending games at the team’s Citi Field home field can now purchase snacks and beverages at a self-checkout kiosk that uses a biometrics-based identity verification system to process payments — and check that buyers of alcoholic drinks are of legal drinking age... More