Employees of 14 Vancouver-based businesses have been issued with a new type of transit card that lets them use a single payment method for travel on public transport operator TransLink, for bike sharing with Mobi by Shaw Go and car sharing with Modo and Evo — and then “view expenses for each mode at the end of the month in one convenient location, through a streamlined expense report”... 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
Gautrain, the commuter rail service that connects the South African cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria, is to let passengers use their contactless bank cards to pay for their journeys by tapping on and off the service from 31 October... More
Uber users in Delhi can now use the app to plan journeys on the Delhi Metro and on local bus services — and will soon be able to purchase train tickets from within the Uber app as well. 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
Australia’s Transport for NSW has introduced Opal Connect, a new service that aims to become “a one stop shop for all transport transactions and information, whether it is public transport, rideshare, taxis, parking and even tolling”... 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
Mastercard has signed up four WHSmith retail brands for Pay by Bank (PbBa), a strong customer authentication-compliant payments service that uses customers’ mobile banking apps and the UK’s faster payments system to let online retailers accept payments direct from shoppers’ bank accounts... More
PARTNER NEWS: Visa has announced that it has now completed its acquisition from Rambus of the company’s payments and ticketing businesses — formerly known as Bell ID and Ecebs. More
A new bus ticketing system that lets passengers use face recognition to make hands-free payments for their tickets has entered pilot testing in Kazakhstan’s capital city of Nur-Sultan... 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
The Australian state of Queensland has begun the first of a series of pilots ahead of the rollout of its A$371m (US$249m) Smart Ticketing system, due to go live in 2022. A one-month pilot of new express ticketing gates is taking place at Brisbane’s Central Station More
Travellers in Russia’s capital can now use China UnionPay’s Quickpass contactless cards or an NFC payment app connected to a Quickpass card to pay their fares at 150 Moscow Metro stations, China’s Xinhua news agency reports... More
The UK government has introduced an iOS version of its EU Exit: ID Document Check app, enabling EU citizens to use the NFC passport reading capabilities Apple has introduced in iOS 13 to register for settled status in the UK... 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
Apple Pay “has caught the eye of EU antitrust investigators, who have asked payment companies for feedback on the service,” regulatory risk specialist MLex reports... More
The European Banking Authority (EBA) has issued a new Opinion that provides the European payments industry with an EU-wide additional 15 months to comply with strong customer authentication (SCA) requirements for online ecommerce transactions... 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
Samsung’s NFC phone-based contactless payments acceptance service is now live in Canada and is to be introduced globally “starting in 2020”, the company has announced... More
