Some 17.3 million people or nearly a third (32%) of adult consumers in the UK were registered to use their smartphone or smart watch to make mobile payments in stores by the end of 2020, a “significant” increase of 7.4 million people compared with 2019, according to UK Finance... More
Retailers and other small business owners in six US cities will soon be able to accept contactless payments on an Android NFC smartphone using Visa’s software-only Tap to Phone solution... More
China Construction Bank (CCB) is piloting a biometric ‘hard wallet’ smart card that lets customers store digital yuan and authenticate payments made using the central bank digital currency (CBDC) with their fingerprint... More
Chinese consumers can now open digital yuan wallets using different levels of customer identification depending on the transaction and balance limits they require and can activate wallets “with the lowest authority” with just their mobile phone number in line with the “principle of controllable anonymity”, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has revealed... More
Consumers in the US can now receive a US$2.50 credit to their mobile wallet that they can use to buy a Coca-Cola beverage at any restaurant that accepts card payments... More
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) is launching “a comprehensive study” that will explore the use cases, benefits and risks of developing a digital Hong Kong dollar as a central bank digital currency (CBDC)... More
Passengers travelling on Brescia Mobilità buses in the northern Italian city and 14 surrounding municipalities can now make contactless fare payments with their credit or debit card or from a digital wallet on their NFC phone or smart watch... More
Contactless payments technology is causing “a sizable increase in the use of debit cards for small-value payments”, but is having an “economically small and statistically insignificant” impact on the use of cash and cash demand, according to a study conducted by the World Bank... More
Sweden’s central bank The Riksbank is to begin testing its e-krona central bank digital currency (CBDC) with external partners to assess how a digital krona would operate within a real world banking and payments infrastructure... More
Portuguese supermarket chain Continente has opened its first autonomous cashierless store in Lisbon, enabling customers to use a QR code generated in the company’s Labs app to access the shop and automatically pay for their purchases from their mobile phone without needing to scan their goods or use a checkout... More
Apple is seeking to recruit a business development manager to research and form partnerships with “strategic alternative payment providers”, launch “new programs” and contribute to “business strategy and product roadmaps for the growth of Apple Pay and Wallet Services”, a job advertisement posted by the company reveals... More
Consumers in the Cologne-Bonn area of Germany will soon be able to receive digital receipts on their NFC smartphone for in-store purchases at merchants taking part in a pilot of a new digital receipt service being launched by the Sparkasse group of savings banks... More
Passengers travelling on UK train services are to get more contactless and digital ticketing options across the rail network and will be able to buy tickets and access fare and timetable information via a single integrated website, the UK government has announced... More
Almost nine in 10 card present transactions conducted globally (86.1%) were made using EMV chip-enabled payment cards between January and December 2020, according to standards body EMVCo... More
PARTNER NEWS: Market Pay is enabling merchants to use a standard Android NFC smartphone or tablet to accept contactless payments at the point of sale without needing any additional hardware... More
Ensuring that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are interoperable and integrated with existing payment infrastructures are among the key requirements for their successful implementation in cross border transactions, according to a joint paper published by Swift and Accenture... More
Customers of ABN Amro in the Netherlands can now use their Android devices to make payments with Google Pay from within the Dutch bank’s mobile app... More
Android users can now upload their Clipper transit card to Google Pay, reload their card balance and pay for their fares on 24 transit systems across the San Francisco Bay Area of the USA with their smartphone... More
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has seen the number of monthly digital wallet transactions increase by 90% from 36m in March 2020 to 68m in March this year, with the total value more than doubling from A$2.1bn (US$1.6bn) to A$1bn (US$0.8bn) in the same period... More
The European Commission’s investigation into Apple Pay is “moving ahead on top of an investigation into how the iPhone maker requires software developers to use its in-app purchasing system”, the EU’s competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager has told Bloomberg News... More