SunTrust Banks is now offering Apple Pay to its clients and merchants, joining a long list of US banks already supporting the NFC mobile payment solution... More
Apple
Bi-Lo adds Apple Pay
Bi-Lo Holdings, parent company of the Bi-Lo, Harveys and Winn-Dixie grocery store chains, has announced that it now supports Apple Pay in all of its 830 outlets in eight US states... More
Venmo adds TouchID
Users of the Venmo mobile payment app can now sign in with Apple’s TouchID feature on the iPhone 5S, 6 and 6 Plus... More
CUP moves to block Alipay
China UnionPay (CUP), the country’s official card payments network, has issued notifications to its member banks to tell them “to avoid working with third-party payment services like Alipay”, Want China Times reports... More
Apple Pay retailers release stats
Apple Pay accounts for 50% of tap-and-pay transactions at McDonald’s, which accepts “all payment products that leverage standard NFC”, according to a New York Times report... More
Visa CEO: We may not charge a fee for tokenization
Visa will not charge a fee to card issuers making use of its tokenization service until at least the end of 2015 and may or may not charge a separate fee for the service in the future, CEO Charles Scharf has revealed at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2014 Banking & Financial Services Conference... More
Samsung launches Proximity mobile marketing platform
Samsung has unveiled Proximity, a location-based marketing platform that uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons and works in a similar way to Apple’s iBeacon system — but without the need for consumers to be persuaded to download a marketer’s own app to access the service... More
McDonald’s on mobile payments: We prefer to let our customers choose how they pay
McDonald’s sees accepting NFC mobile payments as part of its on-going customer service improvement remit, the fast food giant’s Anja Carroll has told NFC World+... More
Apple Pay boosts Google Wallet
Google Wallet has seen an uplift of 50% in transactions on a weekly basis since Apple Pay’s launch, with users almost doubling on a monthly basis “in the recent couple of months”, reports Ars Technica... More
Apple Pay contract leaked
The full 19-page contract that banks wishing to offer Apple Pay to their cardholders must sign in order to take part has been leaked to Digital Transactions... More
Apple Pay arrives at more US banks
A second wave of banks are now going live with their Apple Pay deployments, MacRumours reports, with customers of US Bank, PNC Bank, USAA, Navy Federal Credit Union, Barclaycard, M&T Bank, Regions Bank, Renasant Bank, Keesler Federal Credit Union and Zions Bank all reporting that they are now able to use the NFC mobile payments service... More
Starwood Hotels picks Bluetooth for mobile room keys that work on smartphones and Apple Watch
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide has unveiled a mobile keyless entry system that will allow guests to use smartphones to unlock rooms using Bluetooth at 150 hotels around the globe by early 2015. The service will also be available via an Apple Watch app when the new wearable device ships next year, the hotel chain has told NFC World+. More
Visa CEO identifies mobile payment as major growth driver
Mobile payments will be a “great driver” for Visa, CEO Charles Scharf has told analysts during the company’s Q4 earnings call, and Apple Pay is just the beginning... More
McDonald’s adopts Softcard
McDonald’s 14,000 restaurants and drive-thru locations across the US have begun accepting Android NFC mobile payments following a successful pilot program with carrier joint venture Softcard that began in 2013... More
A million consumers sign up for Apple Pay in first 72 hours
Apple Pay saw more than one million card activations within 72 hours of launch and is already the leading NFC payments player in the US, Apple CEO Tim Cook has revealed during the Wall Street Journal’s WSJDLive event. Cook also outlined future growth plans for the service, including a potential partnership with Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba. More
Apple Pay and HCE to push NFC payments to more than 500m users
There will be some 516m users of NFC mobile payment services by the end of 2019, up from 101m this year, thanks to the launch of Apple Pay and HCE, a forecast from Juniper Research has found... More
NRF defends retailers’ decision to block NFC payments
“Merchants large and small make business decisions every single day based upon what makes the best sense for the business, their associates and most importantly, their customers,” says Mallory Duncan, senior vice president of the US’s National Retail Federation, in a statement issued in the wake of the decision taken by CVS and Rite Aid to stop accepting Apple Pay and other NFC payments... More
US payments body hits out at Rite Aid and CVS
“The decision by CVS and Rite Aid to block mobile payments services like Apple Pay, Google Wallet and Softcard is anti-consumer and anti-competitive,” says US-based trade body the Electronic Transactions Association (ETA), following the MCX consortium members’ decision to stop accepting NFC payments... More
NFC tech included in iPad Mini 3
Apple has included an NFC chip in its new iPad Mini 3, a teardown by iFixit has revealed... More
MCX retailers turn off NFC payments
US pharmacy chains Rite Aid and CVS, both members of the MCX retailer-owned consortium which is due to launch its CurrentC mobile payment service in 2015, have stopped accepting NFC payments in the wake of the launch of Apple Pay. More