Sweden’s central bank The Riksbank has begun testing a digital currency designed to enable consumers to store an electronic version of the Swedish krona in a digital wallet and make payments, deposits and withdrawals using a mobile app... More
Iconic UK retailer M&S is expanding its mobile self-checkout service to 49 stores across London, following a successful pilot at six stores that saw a Mobile Pay Go transaction being made every three seconds during lunchtime trading... More
Mastercard is working with transport operators on the development of new biometric ticketing solutions that will make it possible for passengers to be automatically identified as they board a service, the payments network has revealed... More
Payments made via Apple Pay now account for around 5% of global card transactions, according to research firm Bernstein — and are set to represent 10% of all card transactions by 2025... More
‘Low KYC’ norm to help mobile wallets retain their customers — Economic Times — “In a move set to bring relief to scores of mobile wallet firms such as Paytm, PhonePe, Amazon Pay and their several million users, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will allow wallet service providers to continue operating their millions of non-compliant know-your-customer (KYC) accounts which earlier faced cancellation… An estimated over 200m mobile wallets ran the risk of being cancelled by the regulators, once the deadline to upgrade their non-compliant accounts to ‘full KYC’ accounts expires on February 29.”
The digitalization of payments and currency: Some issues for consideration — The Federal Reserve — “Given the dollar’s important role, it is essential that we remain on the frontier of research and policy development regarding CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currency]. Like other central banks, we are conducting research and experimentation related to distributed ledger technologies and their potential use case for digital currencies, including the potential for a CBDC. We are collaborating with other central banks as we advance our understanding of central bank digital currencies.”
Royal Australian Mint expects lowly silver coins to be phased out amid rise of contactless payments — ABC Radio Melbourne — “Royal Australian Mint chief executive Ross MacDiarmid said demand for coinage had dropped by about 55% in the last five years, and most of that had been for silver coins… Rising inflation, coupled with the growth of online and contactless payments, are rendering the lowly silvers obsolete… Much like the old 1 and 2c coins, phased out in the 1990s, Mr MacDiarmid expected the mint to eventually stop producing 5 and 10c coins.”
Data on the latest adoption rates for contactless transactions, tokenization, transit payments and secure remote commerce has been made available by Visa CEO Al Kelly — along with details of the revenue model to be used by Plaid, which Visa is to acquire for $5.3bn... More
IBM awarded patent for ‘self-aware token’ — Coindesk — “The patent outlines a ledger-based payments system that could make it easier for individual users, businesses and governments to track and trace transactions made using a cryptocurrency. Dubbed the ‘self-aware token’, it is designed to record all transaction data when not being used on a payments platform IBM patented in 2012. When the token rejoins the platform ecosystem at a later stage, it automatically uploads data from any ‘off-line transactions’.”
Italy’s national postal service provider has added QR code-based payments to its mobile payments app, to support the country’s transition from cash to digital payments... More
Public transportation users in Sydney, Australia, are now using their contactless debit card, credit card or linked device to make 1.5m journeys a week, Transport for NSW has revealed... More
New York City has joined New Jersey, Philadelphia and San Francisco in passing legislation that makes it illegal for stores, restaurants and other retail outlets to not accept cash... More
PARTNER NEWS: NFCW readers are invited to join Dejamobile and speakers from Arion Bank, Crédit Agricole, GVS, Stocard, Tribe Payments and Valitor for two digital payments workshops taking place at the Paris Fintech Forum on the morning of 28 January 2020... More
Samsung has teamed up with financial services comparison site Finder to add a credit card shopping feature to Samsung Pay, “enabling everyday Australians to discover compelling credit card offers from participating financial institutions” from within its mobile wallet... More
A group of 20 European banks are working together on “setting up a pan-European payment system to challenge the dominance of Visa, Mastercard and technology companies such as Google and PayPal,” French news agency AFP reports... More
“UPI has had the fastest acceptance rate not just among payment platforms but digital platforms of any kind,” Dilip Asbe, chief executive officer of the National Payments Corporation of India, has told Bloomberg... More
Mastercard has signed up four WHSmith retail brands for Pay by Bank (PbBa), a strong customer authentication-compliant payments service that uses customers’ mobile banking apps and the UK’s faster payments system to let online retailers accept payments direct from shoppers’ bank accounts... More
Visa, Mastercard, eBay, Stripe and Mercado Pago have followed PayPal in pulling out of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency project. The moves mean that PayU is now the only payments company to still be listed as a founding member of the Libra Association. More
PARTNER NEWS: Raiffeisen Bank has launched an Android NFC mobile payments service in Romania and the Czech Republic that uses Antelop Solutions’ digital payments and tokenization platform... More
“In the last 12 months alone, we’ve grown more than three times to 67 million monthly active users, driving transactions worth over US$110bn on an annualised basis, with hundreds of thousands of offline and online merchants,” Caesar Sengupta, vice president of Google’s next billion users initiative, has revealed... More