Nearly one in three of all payments in the UK were made using contactless cards or with a smartphone or smart watch in 2021 (32%), a rise of 36% compared with transaction volumes in 2020, according to figures from UK Finance... More
Apple Pay has launched in Qatar with support for American Express cards and Mastercard and Visa cards issued by seven major banks... More
The proportion of contactless payments made for purchases from vending machines in the US increased from 18% of all transactions in January 2021 to 43% in October 2021, has now reached 48% and “could grow by another 12%” by the end of this year, a new study reveals... More
Merchants in New Zealand can now accept contactless payments on an ordinary Android NFC smartphone using a low-cost software point of sale (sPOS) solution that users will be able to implement without a monthly fee for using the app until January 2024 if transactions are settled to a Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) account... More
Norway, Finland and New Zealand are the three countries closest to becoming cashless societies, followed by Hong Kong, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, the UK, Singapore and the Netherlands, according to research published by Merchant Machine... More
Apple Pay has launched in Malaysia with support for Mastercard and Visa cards issued by AmBank, Maybank and Standard Chartered Bank... More
Customers of Intesa Sanpaolo bank in Italy with a compatible smartphone can now digitise and add their PagoBancomat payment card to a Huawei Pay digital wallet and use it to make in-store NFC mobile payments... More
The number of stores worldwide that enable customers to self-scan their purchases on their own smartphone or a device provided by the merchant rose by 10,000 during 2021 to reach a total of 46,000, but that total is set to more than triple and exceed 161,000 globally by 2027, according to Retail Banking Research (RBR)... More
The total value of digital wallet transactions globally will exceed US$12tn in 2026, up from US$7.5tn in 2022, and the total number of digital wallet users worldwide will increase from 3.4 billion in 2022 to more than 5.2 billion in 2026, according to a forecast by Juniper Research... More
Moscow Metro’s Face Pay biometric contactless fare payment system has achieved “high satisfaction rates” with nearly nine in ten users saying they “appreciate the advantages of the technology and prefer this system to other payment methods” (88%), a survey reveals... More
Passengers travelling on the Metrolink tram network in the UK city of Manchester can no longer purchase a one-day travel pass on Transport for Greater Manchester’s Get Me There mobile ticketing app and are instead being encouraged to use the network’s open loop contactless fare payment system that incorporates daily and weekly fare capping... More
Football fans in Mexico can now make contactless payments from a stored-value digital wallet to buy Corona beer at selected matches at Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium using an NFC chip attached to the inside of a soccer jersey... More
PARTNER NEWS: Dejamobile has become the first software-only contactless POS solution provider to be certified by French bank card association Groupement des Cartes Bancaires (CB), opening the way for merchants to begin piloting the technology for contactless CB card payments acceptance... More
The number of US consumers who use their smartphone to scan QR codes to make contactless payments and for a wide range of other use cases such as scanning codes in print publications, on restaurant menus and in retail outlets will rise from 83.4 million in 2022 to 99.5 million by 2025, according to an Insider Intelligence forecast... More
Just over a third of UK consumers now have a digital wallet (34%), but that proportion rises to more than two thirds among 18-34 year olds (64%) compared with just 18% among 54-65 year olds, a survey has found... More
Google has begun rolling out a multipurpose digital wallet that enables users to store, use and present digital credentials such as identity cards and health passes as well as payment cards, transit and event tickets and hotel keys in 39 countries across Europe, the Americas and Asia... More
Supermarket chain Aldi is trialling its first checkout-free contactless store in continental Europe in the Dutch city of Utrecht, enabling customers to enter the store by scanning an app, selecting items from the shelves and then leaving without needing to scan their purchases or use a conventional checkout... More
The central banks of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand are to develop an interoperable cross-border payments system that will enable residents of each country to use their mobile banking app to make QR code-based payments for goods and services when visiting any of the other territories... More
Food cart service provider FrostHead has provided its sellers at the Lollapalooza outdoor music festival in Sweden with the ability to accept contactless payments for food, drinks and earplugs using a software application that they can download onto a standard Android NFC smartphone... More
Taiwanese visitors to Okinawa prefecture in Japan will soon be able to make contactless payments directly settled in New Taiwan Dollars for small-value purchases using their EasyCard stored-value smart payments and transit card... More