MCX CEO Dekkers Davidson has left the retailer-led consortium to “pursue other opportunities” in the same week it was announced that founder member Best Buy will roll out support for rival mobile payments service Apple Pay later this year... More
Retailer owned mobile payments consortium MCX has confirmed to NFC World that it will launch its CurrentC mobile wallet in an unspecified mid-sized US market soon, following the announcement that founder member Best Buy will begin to accept rival mobile payments service Apple Pay in its stores later this year... More
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide has launched an app for the Apple Watch that enables wearers to tap their device to unlock hotel room doors via Bluetooth... More
US retail giant Best Buy, a founder member of retailer-led consortium MCX which requires members to exclusively support its own yet-to-launch mobile payments service, has announced that it will accept Apple Pay NFC payments in its stores “later this year”... More
Apple Pay will be supported by all major US credit card companies “beginning this fall” after Discover announced plans to join Visa, MasterCard and American Express in letting its cardholders add cards and make NFC payments using the mobile payments service... More
Online payments giant PayPal has revealed it is again testing NFC, though the company’s president has made clear that he’d like the company’s platform to be technology agnostic and he doesn’t see the long-term success of NFC as assured... More
Coffee chain Starbucks has 16 million active users of its mobile app who are making eight million mobile payments a week, equalling nearly 19% of all transactions in US stores, president and COO Kevin Johnson has revealed, and the company is preparing to roll out its successful Mobile Order and Pay service across the US, UK and Canada before the end of 2015... More
Some 100m Apple Pay-capable smartphones will be available in the US in 2020, up from 53m this year, according to Mercator Advisory Group... More
Apple Pay has become the top choice of services among US consumers planning on using mobile payments in the next 90 days, a survey conducted by 451 Research has found — and consumers increasingly think mobile payments are more secure than credit cards. More
British brewer Adnams is to roll out a mobile payments and rewards service in its 12 stores and 50 pubs across East Anglia and London this summer using a fee-free platform provided by UK startup Droplet. More
An NFC transport ticketing trial in the Netherlands will allow passengers to see on their phones if they have correctly checked themselves on or off the service as they travel, avoiding the risk of paying too much for their journeys... More
Two NXP engineers have been nominated for a prestigious inventors’ award from the European Patent Office in recognition of the role they played in the birth of NFC. More
The NFC Forum has published the second version of its specification for signing and vouching for the integrity of data held in NFC tags, adding support for compact certificates and new signature algorithms... More
The largest NFC mobile payment initiative in Germany to date has launched in the capital Berlin, as the country’s three mobile network operators, Vodafone Germany, Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica, team up with six major retail groups to update more than 2,000 point-of-sale terminals to support NFC payments in nearly 500 stores... More
Wearable device maker Jawbone has unveiled a fitness tracking wristband that can be linked to the wearer’s American Express card account and used to make NFC payments... More
Luxury watchmaker Kairos is to add NFC payments to its hybrid “mechanical smartwatches” and smart wristbands using a host card emulation-based wearable payments solution from German payments technology provider Wirecard... More
KFC is letting customers use their phones to pay for meals through mobile network operator Airtel’s mobile money platform in five of the fast-food chain’s stores in Accra, Ghana... More
A total of 4.7bn SIMs were shipped in 2014 by members of the SIMalliance, an organisation that represents suppliers responsible for 86% of the global SIM market, including 132m NFC SIMs, up 69% on 2013 and taking the total number of NFC SIMs shipped by alliance members over the past four years to 256m. More
Some 185m Europeans will use a mobile payment app this year, up 51% on 2014, a survey of 14,000 consumers for ING has revealed, and respondents say they are far more likely to use apps associated with their bank for mobile payments (59%) over ‘named groups’ such as Apple or Google (39%)... More
Oxfam is to trial NFC-enabled interactive posters, wristbands and collection tins in UK towns to let supporters make donations and see video content highlighting the charity’s work using their NFC phones... More