Chinese mobile payments platform Alipay, which has 450 million active users, is to be made available in Europe this summer, enabling Chinese shoppers to make payments in stores, receive offers and view nearby shops and restaurants that accept the mobile payments service. More
Barclays bank debit cardholders and Barclaycard credit cardholders can now use Apple Pay to make mobile payments, nine months after the service launched in the UK without the participation of the ‘big four’ bank... More
A call by Sweden’s central bank to make using cash a legal right for consumers will create question marks in the minds of central banks and other players in international markets and will raise “some concerns” about a completely cashless society, the CEO of Turkish card payment system operator BKM has told attendees during a panel session at Money20/20 Europe. More
The increase in the UK contactless card payment limit from £20 to £30 has had “a transformative effect” on consumer spending habits, according to Visa Europe, with contactless transactions over £20 seeing an average monthly growth rate of 19.1% between October 2015 and March 2016 — more than twice the average monthly growth rate of 8% for contactless transactions under £20... More
PARTNER NEWS: Digital security giant Gemalto is supplying Singapore’s mobile network operators with UpTeq Multi-Tenant NFC SIMs for the rollout of a service enabling commuters to use a mobile version of their EZ-Link transit card to pay for public transportation and for purchases at some 30,000 local retail outlets... More
NFC World will host a free webinar on Thursday 12 May that will explore how and why payments service provider Nets chose an in-house solution to deliver a tokenization service that can scale to serve more than 200 client banks across the Nordic region... More
The five largest banks in Switzerland are in talks with financial infrastructure operator SIX and retail giants Coop and Migros over the launch of a common solution for mobile payments “across all channels” that can be “rapidly spread” across the country. More
NFC World partners Proxama, Giesecke & Devrient, Gemalto, Carta Worldwide and Bell ID will be exhibiting at the Money20/20 Europe expo in Copenhagen from April 4-7. More
The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) has formed a specialist consortium to create a UK manufacturing supply chain that will support the widespread adoption of NFC packaging. More
Consumers in major shopping centres across Australia can now donate to veteran support group Walking Wounded by tapping a contactless card against advertising screens that have been activated for payment by out of home media provider oOh!media. More
EMVCo has updated its tokenization specification to include a new payment account reference (PAR) that can be used to link a cardholder’s payment token with their primary account number (PAN) without needing to use their underlying account number... More
More than 100,000 customers of SK Telecom in Korea have subscribed to T Pay, a hands free mobile payment and rewards service based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology that launched earlier this month. More
Customers of mobile network operators M1, Singtel and StarHub can now pay for journeys on public transport services in Singapore with a tap of their NFC device as a result of a partnership between the Land Transport Authority (LTA), Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and transport card issuer EZ-Link. More
Samsung Pay has begun rolling out across China, letting consumers make mobile payments with a compatible device “virtually anywhere you can swipe or tap your card” using their China UnionPay debit and credit cards. More
A white paper that examines the advantages of using new, digital PIN delivery mechanisms to replace traditional PIN mailers is now available to download from the NFC World+ Knowledge Centre. More
Canadian financial services provider BMO Financial Group is to enable its customers to use MasterCard’s Identity Check mobile app to verify their online transactions via face recognition and fingerprint biometrics... More
“At this stage, we are not planning on participating in Android Pay in the UK,” British ‘big four’ bank Barclays has told NFC World... More
Google has announced that it is to launch its Android Pay mobile payment service in the UK within the “next few months.” The service will launch with support from MasterCard, Visa and eight UK financial institutions. Barclays, one of the UK’s “big four” banks and an NFC mobile payments pioneer, is a notable absence from the list. More
Handset maker Huawei has partnered with bank card association China UnionPay for the roll out of Huawei Pay, an NFC-based mobile payment service that makes use of tokenization technology and is expected to be available on a wide range of Huawei handsets. More
Santander customers in the UK with an Apple iOS device will soon be able to use their voice to interact with their SmartBank mobile banking app in order to make payments, retrieve information such as how much they have spent and perform queries on specific transactions... More