Nine in ten card payments made in UK stores during 2020 (88.6%) were contactless and the average contactless user made 141 transactions worth a total of £1,640 (US$2,241) over the course of the year, according to Barclaycard... More
Owners of Samsung’s new Galaxy S21 smartphones in the USA will not be able to make payments using Samsung Pay’s magnetic secure transmission (MST) technology... More
Mastercard is piloting a cloud-based version of its Tap on Phone payments acceptance solution, enabling merchants of all sizes to accept cloud-hosted contactless payments directly on their Android NFC smartphone or tablet... More
Public transport users in Dubai can now use a Huawei NFC smartphone to pay for tickets on metro, tram, waterbus and other transit services operated by the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) using a digital version of the Nol transit card... More
Merchants in India can now use a standard NFC mobile phone to accept contactless RuPay domestic card payments valued at up to 5,000 rupees (US$68)... More
The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has completed the rollout of its Omny contactless fare payment system across the whole of the city, enabling passengers to pay for their tickets with their contactless bank card or mobile wallet at all 472 subway stations and on 5,800 buses across the city... More
Passengers travelling on the G:link light rail network on Queensland’s Gold Coast are the first to trial an open loop transportation ticketing system that the Australian state plans to roll out across all forms of public transport in 18 regional centres by 2022... More
Customers of CIBC can now make purchases of up to C$250 (US$196) with their debit card using Apple Pay, Samsung Pay or Google Pay following a 150% increase in the Canadian bank’s transaction limit for in-store payments with a mobile phone or smartwatch... More
Consumers in Italy can now receive an automatic 10% refund into their bank account for cashless in-store payments made using a credit, debit or prepaid card or payment app between now and the end of the year — as long as they make at least 10 digital transactions during the period... More
PARTNER NEWS: NFC testing innovator Cilab has added support for EMVCo 3.0b to its high speed tester, enabling POS terminal manufacturers to quickly and easily debug and conduct pre-certification testing of their devices ahead of the new EMVCo specification coming into force in mid-2021... More
Businesses in the US can now issue their employees with virtual corporate cards that can be loaded into a mobile wallet and used to make payments at contactless point-of-sale terminals... More
Owners of small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) in the UAE can now accept contactless payments on standard Android NFC smartphones, with no need for additional hardware... More
Residents of the United Arab Emirates can now make in-app and in-store NFC and QR code-enabled contactless payments, international remittances, utility bill payments and P2P financial transfers and apply for instant credit using a single mobile payments app... More
Leading European mobile loyalty wallet provider Stocard has expanded its Stocard Pay service to users in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands, enabling them to make in-store NFC payments in addition to using the wallet to access loyalty cards and redeem rewards... More
Passengers using Matatu minibus services across the Kenyan capital of Nairobi can now make contactless payments for their journeys from their M-Pesa mobile wallet... More
Malaysian consumers with compatible Huawei smartphones can now use Huawei Pay to make NFC mobile payments with an ICBC UnionPay credit card stored in their mobile wallet... More
Google Pay has gone live in Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Portugal and Romania with support for Mastercard and Visa cards issued by participating banks and card issuers... More
More than half (53%) of today’s shoppers have used a mobile contactless payment option for the first time since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a survey by USA-based Inmar Intelligence... More
The number of iPhone users globally that have activated Apple Pay has grown by 66m over the past year, from 441m in September 2019 to 507m in September 2020, according to a study published by Loup Ventures... More
Nearly one in four transactions at Starbucks outlets in the US are now being made using the company’s mobile app, the coffee chain reports. The company’s 2020 fiscal results show that the percentage of mobile orders made using the Starbucks app has increased over the year More
