National Bank of Oman (NBO) has become the first in the country to launch a contactless card pilot, in partnership with MasterCard... More
- Bank of China lets taxi drivers accept central bank digital currency payments on NFC mobile phones
- Juniper forecasts 25% increase in POS terminal transaction values by 2028
- STMicroelectronics launches NFC tag chip with elliptic curve cryptography
- NFC Forum survey finds majority of consumers now prefer making payments with their mobile phone
- Hello, NFCW readers!
Visa Europe to participate in Apple Pay UK launch
Visa Europe has confirmed that it will play a part in the the UK launch of Apple Pay and will give debit, credit and reloadable prepaid cardholders access to the payment system... More
Apple Pay adds loyalty cards and expands to UK
Apple Pay will be available in the UK from July 2015, vice president of Apple Pay business Jennifer Bailey has announced at the iPhone maker’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Users of the mobile payments service will also be able to add store credit, debit and loyalty cards to their Apple mobile wallet from “this fall”. More
Carta and YellowPepper take HCE to Latin America
PARTNER NEWS: Carta Worldwide is to provide its host card emulation (HCE) technology to Latin American mobile payments specialist YellowPepper, allowing it to offer the “latest in mobile payments technology” to the region’s banks and merchants. More
Lycos unveils wearables with NFC
Internet company Lycos has announced a line of NFC-equipped wearable devices including a ring ($59.99) and a wristband (US$124.99) that tracks the wearer’s physical activity, displays incoming calls and notifications and connects to a smartphone with a tap... More
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Google files contact lens authentication patent
Google has filed a patent with the US Patent and Trademark Office that describes a contact lens which collects reflected light through sensors to assemble an image of the iris that is then matched against a stored image to authenticate the wearer... More
Brain waves could replace passwords
Brain waves could be used to verify a person’s identity in the future, researchers from Binghamton University have demonstrated in a study published in academic journal Neurocomputing... More
Dutch banks plan instant payments
Dutch banks have laid out plans to facilitate instant payments within four years, with a view to creating a “new payment infrastructure” that would transfer payments within five seconds... More
Bucharest buses to use Bluetooth beacons to guide the blind
Five hundred Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons are to be installed on buses and trolleybuses on two public transportation lines in the city of Bucharest, Romania to guide visually impaired passengers on and off buses so that they can use public transportation services without needing a personal assistant. More
Google misses out on transaction fee revenues
Google won’t earn any transaction fees from credit card issuers for Android Pay, unlike Apple which receives 0.15% of the value of each credit card transaction made with Apple Pay, sources have told The Wall Street Journal.“That is because Visa and MasterCard recently standardised their tokenization card-security service and made it free, preventing payments services from charging fees to issuers,” the newspaper reports... More
Samsung smartwatches to support Samsung Pay?
Samsung is planning to offer Samsung Pay mobile payments on the smartwatch devices it is scheduled to launch in the second half of this year... More
Apple Pay to launch in UK this summer?
Apple is reported to be planning to launch Apple Pay in the UK this summer, with an announcement expected today at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference... More
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UK retailers to go 100% contactless by 2020
“From the beginning of next year, any new payment terminal that gets deployed has to accept contactless,” MasterCard’s head of emerging payments products Mike Cowan told attendees at the company’s Future of Payments event in London this week, TechWeek Europe reports... More
Less than a quarter of top US retailers accept Apple Pay
Fewer than a quarter of the National Retail Federation’s list of the top 100 US retailers are now accepting Apple Pay, with nearly two-thirds saying they will not be accepting it this year and only four saying they have plans to add support in the next 12 months, research conducted by Reuters has found... More
Vodafone Turkey adds eye verification to mobile wallet app
Vodafone Turkey is adding support for eye verification to its mobile wallet to enable users to unlock the app using biometric provider EyeVerify’s Eyeprint ID technology. More
TfL clocks up 100m contactless payment journeys
Transport for London (TfL) is now processing 1.2m open loop contactless payment transactions every day and is seeing 18,000 new contactless payment cards on a daily basis, with a total of 4m now in use... More
Verizon announces investment in SimplyTapp
PARTNER NEWS: Verizon Ventures, the investment arm of US carrier Verizon, has revealed that it was the undisclosed lead investor in a Series B funding round for HCE specialist SimplyTapp that totalled US$6m. More
AT&T boss admits mobile payment failure
The CEO of AT&T has admitted that the US carrier’s mobile payment efforts have failed in light of the closure of Softcard, the joint venture between it, T-Mobile USA and Verizon... More
One in five Europeans expect to make daily mobile payments by 2020
One in five Europeans expects to use their mobile phone to make payments on a daily basis by 2020, growing from the one in ten who do so already today, research from Visa Europe has found. 53% expect to use their devices for payments at least once a week and 43% are also interested in making in-store NFC mobile payments. More
Kantar: 13% of US iPhone 6 owners have used Apple Pay
Some 13% of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners in the US have used Apple Pay and 11% are planning to do so, a survey conducted by Kantar Worldpanel has revealed. Only 2% choose not to use the mobile payments service due to lack of trust, 4% do not use it because they don’t understand how it works, while 11% say their credit cards “work just fine.” More