Harbortouch, a US-based point-of-sale system and merchant services provider, has unveiled Perkwave, a mobile app that uses Apple Pay to let customers pay at the table in participating restaurants. The service also includes loyalty and rewards functionality to encourage customers to pay using their mobile device. More
Singapore carrier Singtel is taking carrier billing into the physical goods world with a pilot test of a service that lets customers order Angry Birds plush toys for delivery to their home address and charge the cost to their phone bill... More
Starbucks customers in Portland are to be the first in the US to be able to order and pay for their coffee ahead of arrival and the service will be rolled out across the country in 2015, the company has announced... More
JPMorgan Chase plans to make its debit and credit cards available in a wide array of mobile wallets — including one of its own to be launched later this year — even if that means cutting current margins, CEO Jamie Dimon has told analysts during the bank’s third quarter earnings call. More
MasterCard has partnered with Zwipe, maker of a contactless payment card that includes an integrated fingerprint biometric sensor, for the commercial launch of the technology following a pilot with Norway’s Sparebanken DIN. More
The Dubai Corporation for Ambulance Services (DCAS) has launched an app that lets users store medical information and contact details that can be retrieved in an emergency with a tap of an NFC phone. More
iPhone 6 and 6 Plus users with Visa cards issued by Bank of America, Capital One, Citi Bank, Chase and Wells Fargo Bank will be able to use Apple Pay in stores from launch on 20 October, Visa says. More
Buyers of the iPad Air 2 will be the first to use a new Apple SIM that comes preinstalled in the Wi-Fi+Cellular version of the tablet and looks set to be the first implementation of a “SIM Within” patent published in November 2011. More
Apple customers in the US will be able to use their iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus to make Apple Pay mobile payments from Monday 20 October, CEO Tim Cook has announced, and 500 banks have now signed up to offer the service to their customers... More
Groupe BPCE, the second largest banking group in France, has launched a service that will let users of its S-Money mobile app send money transfers via Twitter. More
UK supermarket giant Tesco is conducting a one week test of Powa’s PowaTag mobile payments technology at its Dean Street store in London. To promote the service, a free lunchtime Meal Deal was offered on 13 and 14 October to the first five hundred shoppers to download the PowaTag app and use it to pay with their mobile phone. More
Hong Kong mobile network operator SmarTone has introduced ST Beacon, a marketing service that lets retailers send promotional messages to customers with an Android or iOS device using Bluetooth... More
Square has added a feature to its Square Cash app that lets users leverage Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to make payments to anyone nearby, as well as an order ahead service for users of its Android and iOS apps... More
Pay with Hailo, a service that uses Apple’s iBeacon technology to let users of the Hailo taxi hailing app pay drivers with their smartphone, is experiencing “steady growth”, Naoise Irwin, the company’s VP of strategic initiatives, has told NFC World+ — and Hailo now plans to roll out the service across its growing international network... More
A newly published Apple patent application provides insights into how the iPhone maker’s new Apple Pay service will work, how the company has optimized the iPhone’s NFC capabilities to ensure the best possible user experience at the point of sale, and how secure payment credentials will be provisioned onto secondary devices such as the Apple Watch... More
Spain’s CaixaBank is making contactless wristbands available to customers at all of its branches, enabling customers to make payments at any of the more than 300,000 contactless terminals in Spain by simply touching the band to a merchant’s POS device... More
ALH Group, operator of more than 300 pubs in Australia, is to introduce a mobile payment service developed by Clipp that allows customers to “open, view, share and pay their bar tab or restaurant bill securely and instantly.”... More
TSM NZ, the NFC payments joint venture between New Zealand’s carriers and the Paymark payments network, has announced a new brand name, a November date for its first trials — and a marketing partnership with Samsung... More
Zapp, the mobile payments startup formed by UK payments infrastructure operator VocaLink, has announced that major retail chains including Sainsbury’s, Asda, House of Fraser, Thomas Cook, Shop Direct, Spar and Clarks are to use its service to let customers make payments with their mobile phones... More
“Apple Pay is a great example of how a cell phone that identifies its user in a pretty strong way lets you make a transaction that should be very, very inexpensive,” Microsoft founder Bill Gates has told Bloomberg TV... More