Commonwealth Bank of Australia and National Australia Bank as well as supermarket chains Coles and Woolworths and fintechs Azupay, Beem It and Merchant Warrior have confirmed they will support the rollout of the national QR payments and rewards platform developed by Australia’s Eftpos payments system... More
Consumers purchasing face masks manufactured by US-based personal protective equipment (PPE) provider Aegle will be able to verify the authenticity of their purchase via an NFC chip... More
Residents of Wellington in New Zealand will be able to record their movements directly into a digital diary on the NZ Covid Tracer app by tapping an NFC tag with their NFC smartphones at locations trialling the tap-and-trace technology... More
Apple users can now download and store verifiable health records including their Covid-19 vaccination status and test results in the Health app on their iPhone and will soon be able to add a card proving their vaccination status in Apple Wallet... More
Just over two-thirds of consumers globally (67%) now expect bricks-and-mortar retail stores to accept contactless payments and just under half (44%) wouldn’t shop at a store that only offers payment methods that require contact with a cashier or shared device, a survey of merchants and consumers in nine countries around the world has found... More
Nearly two in three consumers in the UK (62%) would now prefer to use their payment card through a mobile wallet compared with 31% last year, according to a survey commissioned by Samsung Pay... More
California has released the code for both the front end and middle tier of its Digital Covid-19 Vaccine Record into the public domain to enable other US states to deploy their own digital vaccination record systems more quickly... More
The total number of digital ticketing transactions worldwide will increase by 62% from 20.8bn in 2021 to 33.8bn in 2023, with bus and metro ticketing accounting for one in three (33%) of those transactions, according to a forecast by Juniper Research... More
A research paper published by the University of Exeter in the UK identifies the lack of global standards as one of the key barriers to the successful implementation of digital and paper-based Covid-19 health status certificates worldwide... More
Residents of the Chinese city of Shanghai will soon be able to scan their Suishenma digital ID and health QR code to pay for their fares on buses, ferries and metro services, the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government has announced... More
The UK will begin rolling out a new £100 (US$137) spending limit for contactless payments from 15 October 2021, UK Finance has announced... More
Australia’s Department of Home Affairs is piloting an Electronic Travel Authority (ETA) app that enables eligible travellers to apply for an electronic visa to enter the country and authenticate their identity credentials by scanning their passport with an NFC-enabled mobile device... More
Residents of Australia can now opt to store a digital vaccination certificate proving that they have been fully inoculated against Covid-19 in either Apple Wallet on an iOS device or in Google Pay on an Android device... More
Starbucks customers have accumulated a total unspent balance of US$1.628bn on the company’s prepaid physical and digital reward and gift cards, the coffee giant’s 2021 Q3 earnings call has revealed... More
The total value of contactless card transactions worldwide will reach US$2.5tn in 2021, up from US$1.7tn in 2020, Juniper Research predicts. The researchers also forecast that card payments will retain “the majority share of overall contactless transaction values at 79% in 2021”. More
Students and staff at Kindai University in the Japanese city of Osaka are testing a biometric payments service that enables them to authenticate payments with their face even when they are wearing a mask... More
The European Union’s Digital Covid Certificate is now live across the EU as well as in non-member states Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, enabling residents to be issued with a proof of their Covid-19 vaccination status, negative Covid test result or recovery from the illness that is recognised regionwide... More
Google Pay has updated its Passes API to enable healthcare organisations, government agencies and other authorised bodies to create digital Covid-19 vaccination and test result certificates that Android users can store and display directly on their mobile device even if they have not installed the Google Pay app... More
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
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