Apple Watch owners with tattooed wrists have been reporting that their smartwatches are not functioning properly as the LED-based heart monitor built into the devices experiences difficulty detecting that the watch is being worn — an issue which impacts the use of Apple Pay among other features such as receiving notifications, placing phone calls and using some applications. More
The “overwhelming majority” of financial institutions and retailers are currently investing or planning to invest in new payment technologies within the next 18 to 24 months, with online (86%) and mobile payment technologies (84%) topping the list, a survey by payments provider ACI and IT consultants Ovum has found. More
More than 31m UK mobile users (92%) will make a payment using their mobile device in 2015, multichannel sales specialist Oxygen8 has found... More
EMV payments on plastic cards won’t achieve broad adoption in the US until 2020, Forrester Research predicts, due to the rise of “more secure” mobile and contactless payment alternatives... More
Digital banking solutions provider Digital Insight is to offer Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint verification in the iOS mobile banking applications it supplies to financial institutions later this year... More
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Ukrainian drivers can now pay for fuel at more than 1,300 outlets across the country using a mobile payment service launched by Russian internet company Yandex, in partnership with PrivatBank and MasterCard. More
Chinese internet giant Tencent has released a mobile operating system that is set to include mobile payments functionality... More
Samsung managing director Park Jin-young hinted during the company’s first quarter earnings call that the forthcoming Samsung Pay system may also work with its smartwatches... More
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. The SPG (Starwood Preferred Guest) app incorporates the SPG Keyless door entry system, which has been available for iPhones and Android devices since November 2014. 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
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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
Users of Vodafone’s M-Pesa and MTN Group’s MTN Mobile Money services in east Africa will soon be able to transfer money to each other following an agreement between the region’s two biggest mobile network operators... 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
Twitter has invested an undisclosed sum in Boston-based proximity marketing specialist Swirl, hinting the social media platform could be looking at using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons to push messages. The social media giant has invested alongside Hearst Ventures, Softbank Capital and others in an $18m series-C round, taking the total raised by Swirl so far to $32m... 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. The company is also forecasting that the future of the mobile payment service will be bright, despite usage problems that surfaced among early adopters attempting to make an in-store purchase using the service. More
Vodafone customers in the Netherlands can now make NFC payments with a mobile version of a credit card... 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