Canadian open NFC mobile wallet provider Ugo is in the process of incorporating a host card emulation (HCE) solution into its Ugo Wallet and expects to begin offering the service by the early summer of this year, the company has told NFC World. More
Mobile payments
National Australia Bank launches HCE mobile payments
Customers of National Australia Bank (NAB) can now make host card emulation (HCE) based mobile payments at any contactless terminal using NAB Pay, a new service that has been integrated into the bank’s existing mobile banking app and makes use of Visa’s tokenization technology... More
Metrolink to deploy mobile ticketing across Southern California
Passengers on Southern California’s Metrolink rail system will soon be able to pay for tickets on their smartphone and validate them at barcode readers on station turnstiles... More
Barclays to support Apple Pay within “60 to 75 days”
Barclays will add support for Apple Pay “within the next 60 to 75 days”, the bank’s Ashok Vaswani has revealed in an email to a customer... More
Bell ID acquired by chip maker Rambus’ digital security division
PARTNER NEWS: Tokenization and mobile payments specialist Bell ID has been acquired by chip maker Rambus... More
Visa reports 250% growth in UK contactless transactions
Contactless now accounts for one in seven Visa transactions across the UK, up from one in 25 a year ago, the payment network has revealed, with contactless payments growing 250% year-on-year and 60% of transactions occurring outside London... More
CaixaBank will not support MST transactions when it launches Samsung Pay in Spain
Spain’s CaixaBank has revealed that it will not include support for Samsung Pay’s Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) technology when the bank launches support for the mobile payment service in the coming months... More
Irish transit users get NFC top-ups
Travellers in Ireland can now top up their Leap public transport card by tapping it against their NFC phone and entering their payment details... More
Chicago commuters make 1m mobile journeys
The Ventra mobile ticketing app introduced by Chicago’s Metra commuter rail service in November 2015 has been used by passengers on more than one million journeys in its first two months... More
Apple Pay adds 51 US banks
Apple has added another 51 banks and credit unions to its list of Apple Pay supporting financial institutions in the US... More
A third of US consumers now use mobile wallets
Nearly a third of US consumers (32%) are currently using a mobile wallet such as Apple Pay or Android Pay, research from Vibes reveals... More
Swiss banks add support for Paymit mobile payments
Paymit, the P2P transfer service set up by Switzerland’s SIX, UBS and Zürcher Kantonalbank, has added support from three more banks ahead of its launch as an in-store mobile payment solution in February 2016... More
Otto Group to offer PowaTag mobile payments
German retail giant Otto Group has partnered with Powa Technologies to offer its customers mobile payments through PowaTag, a service that lets consumers make purchases by capturing ‘PowaTags’ using their mobile device... More
Alipay reports 65% share of China’s online payments market
Nearly two thirds (65%) of online payments in China were made through Alipay last year, findings published by the mobile payments provider and reported by ECNS reveal... More
Swatch and Visa to take Bellamy smartwatch to Rio Olympics
Visitors to this summer’s Rio 2016 Olympics will be able to use luxury watchmaker Swatch’s Bellamy NFC smartwatch to pay for event passes, according to the Financial Times... More
Starbucks sees rise in US mobile transactions
Some 22% of all US transactions in Starbucks during December were made using mobile apps, up from 21% in November 2015, the company’s Kevin Johnson reported during the coffee chain’s first quarter earnings call. “Over one million customers in the US used Mobile Order & Pay capability in the month of December and those customers averaged approximately five mobile orders in the month,” Johnson added... More
Apple Pay leads US mobile payments market
Apple Pay is “overwhelmingly the share leader” in point-of-sale mobile payments across the US despite uptake remaining relatively low, the latest statistics from Piper Jaffray’s Apple Pay adoption tracker show... More
Barclaycard reports 164% increase in contactless transactions for 2015
The value of payments made using a Barclaycard contactless card increased by 164% in 2015 compared to the year before, the UK card issuer has revealed, while the average transaction value increased by 26% to £8.65 (US$12.40)... More
Samsung Pay to let South Koreans pay in China and US
Samsung Pay users in South Korea will soon be able to make payments in China and the US using cards issued by South Korean card companies... More
UK contactless payments hit £1bn record in November 2015
Contactless payments in the UK hit a record £1.02bn (US$1.45bn) in a single month for the first time in November 2015, increasing from £287m in January that year, The UK Cards Association reveals. The number of contactless purchases in November totalled 128m while the average transaction value increased to £8.03, up from £7.72 in October... More