eBay will be prevented from setting up its own payments company when it spins off PayPal to operate as a standalone business later this year, an SEC filing has revealed... More
Archive: News in brief
Microsoft seeks US payments licenses
Microsoft could be poised to enter the payments business after it emerged the software giant has applied for licenses to operate as a money transmitter in all 50 US states... More
Brainwave biometrics to arrive in three years
Consumers could be able to authenticate themselves using brain wave and heart beat bio-signals from as soon as February 2018... More
Barclays offers Apple Watch app
Barclays has unveiled an Apple Watch app which will let customers check their current account balance when the watch goes on sale in the UK on April 24... More
French banks begin HCE payments pilot
BNP Paribas, Groupe BPCE, La Banque Postale and Société Générale have begun piloting HCE mobile payment services with Visa Europe and payment and transaction services provider Worldline... More
Alibaba checks in simple hotel booking
Hotel customers with high credit scores will be able to book rooms on Alibaba’s online travel booking platform Alitrip without having to provide their credit card for room deposits and bypass check-out with payments automatically deducted from their Alipay accounts... More
AMP Bank adds HCE payments to mobile app
Australia’s AMP Bank has added HCE-based NFC mobile payments to its banking app for Android, allowing AMP Visa debit card holders to make payments with their phone at any contactless terminal... More
One in five US mobile phone users made a mobile payment in 2014
22% of US mobile phone users made a mobile payment last year, up from 17% in 2013, research from the Federal Reserve Board reveals... More
TEB to roll out HCE payments in Turkey
Turkey’s Türk Ekonomi Bankasi (TEB) has become the latest European bank to announce plans to launch a host card emulation (HCE) based mobile payments service using a tokenization platform unveiled by Visa Europe in February... More
China Telecom launches NFC ticketing
Residents of Shanghai and Beijing can now ride the metro and pay for tickets with their China Telecom NFC smartphones... More
SaskTel plans mobile payments
Canadian communications provider SaskTel will soon unveil a mobile payments service for its customers, the company has said on Twitter... More
Naver Pay to go live in June
Korean internet portal Naver is to introduce a mobile payments platform from June that will let users verify themselves using fingerprint recognition and make payments using their Naver ID, a password, the mobile number of the recipient and either a credit or debit card... More
SNCF extends NFC train tickets
French railway operator SNCF has expanded availability of its NFC ticketing service to include the Alsace, Aquitaine, Haute-Normandie, Lorraine and Midi-Pyrenees regions... More
Vivo expands Zuum mobile payments service
MFS, a joint venture between Telefonica-owned carrier Vivo and MasterCard, has expanded its Vivo Zuum mobile payment service to São Paulo, the biggest city in Brazil... More
Halifax checks pulse of biometric wristband
UK bank Halifax is investigating how Bionym’s Nymi Band, a device that uses the wearer’s unique cardiac rhythm to authenticate their identity, could be used to reduce the need for customers to remember their passwords... More
Square buys mPOS developer Kili
Square has bought Kili Technology, the Canada-based mPOS startup that acquired NFC-on-microSD pioneer DeviceFidelity in November 2014... More
Most iPhone 6 owners yet to use Apple Pay
Four in five iPhone 6 and 6+ owners in the US are yet to make use of Apple Pay (79%), a Trustev survey has found... More
Commbank turns on HCE
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is now offering customers with an NFC mobile phone running Android 4.4 KitKat or higher the ability to make mobile payments using host card emulation... More
One in three boarding passes to go mobile
More than 1.5bn airline boarding passes will be delivered via mobile by 2019, up from 745m this year, Juniper Research predicts... More
Starbucks expands mobile ordering
Coffee chain Starbucks is expanding its Mobile Order & Pay service to 650 locations in the US states of Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Alaska following a trial which has been running in Portland since December 2014... More