Amazon-owned retail chain Whole Foods Market is to enable customers to gain access to the supermarket and make contactless payments for their purchases with their palm at all of its more than 500 outlets across the USA... More
One in four central banks are now piloting a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) that consumers would be able to use to make payments, a survey of central banks around the world conducted by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has found... More
Merchants in the UK can now use their Apple iPhone to accept contactless payments, with no additional hardware required, Apple has announced... More
Chinese banks have joined a government initiative to add support for payments made using China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) to physical state-issued social security cards, according to local media reports... More
Public transportation users in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon can now pay for the journeys they make on the city’s metro system with a standard contactless bank card, NFC mobile phone or smartwatch. ... More
“We believe that the digital euro is the natural and digital evolution of our currency,” Evelien Witlox, the programme director in charge of the European Central Bank’s digital euro project, reports in a presentation for NFCW’s Contactless World Congress online event series which is now available to view in the NFCW Knowledge Centre... More
Google is adding QR payments to Google Wallet and users in Brazil will be the first in the world to use their Google Wallet to make mobile payments with QR codes, Google VP and country director for Brazil Fabio Coelho has revealed... More
Fashion retail chain Zara has taken delivery of 18,000 reloadable contactless keychains that shoppers can choose instead of the retailer’s existing single-use plastic cards when buying a prepaid card as a gift... More
The Central Bank of Somalia (CBS) has unveiled the Somali Quick Response Code (SOMQR), a new EMVCo-based mobile payments standard “that will guide how payment service providers regulated by CBS will issue Quick Response (QR) Codes to merchants and consumers in the country”... More
More than a quarter of the 193,000 self-checkout systems shipped to merchants around the world in 2022 were installed in non-grocery stores “as the technology penetrates new segments”, research firm RBR has found. ... More
Public transportation users in Auckland, New Zealand, will be able to pay their bus, train and ferry fares using a contactless debit/credit card, Apple Pay or Google Pay “within the next 12 months”, the city’s transport authority has announced. ... More
LVMH Group is to equip staff at its Sephora, Christian Dior Couture, Celine, Tiffany & Co and Louis Vuitton stores in the US with iPhones that use Apple’s Tap to Pay softPOS solution from “later this year”. More
Contactless cards accounted for 84% of the 2.6bn smart cards and modules delivered worldwide by SPA members and advisory council participants in 2022, the Smart Payment Association reports, an increase of 8% on the 76% share in 2021... More
EMV payments grew by more than 350% as a share of cashless sales at food and beverage vending machines in the US and Canada in 2022, an analysis of a sample set of almost 675,000 active card readers has found. ... More
Public transportation users in the Netherlands can now make use of a single, national, integrated contactless ticketing system to pay for their train, bus, tram and metro fares throughout the country, with no need to pre-purchase a ticket or top up a travel card... More
Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) has sold more than 7.4m QR paper tickets since introducing the new ticketing option on 8 May, the transportation operator has revealed. More
Residents of a small village in rural Finland now have access to an unstaffed automated contactless convenience store that uses RAIN RFID tags attached to each item to let shoppers quickly and easily self-checkout using a POS solution equipped with an RFID reader that automatically scans all the items in their basket. ... More
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has officially launched six first-round pilots of a digital Hong Kong dollar or e-HKD with support from 16 banks, payments and technology firms to test the prototype central bank digital currency (CBDC) across a range of use cases including in-store, online and offline payments... More
NatWest bank is launching a software-only point-of-sale (softPOS) solution that will enable merchants in the UK to accept in-person contactless payments on Android NFC smartphones... More
Customers of Kuwait International Bank (KIB) can now apply for a biometric payment card that allows them to authenticate contactless payments at the point of sale with their fingerprints... More