United Airlines and Chase are adding support for United MileagePlus credit cards to the Softcard mobile wallet... More
Mobile payments
Survey: Contactless adoption requires security proof
Two out of three Americans would consider making mobile or contactless payments more often if they were proven to be secure, a survey of 1,000 US consumers conducted by Kelton Research for Gemalto has found... More
Westpac NZ offers NFC stickers
Westpac New Zealand is to offer customers contactless stickers they can attach to the back of their mobile phone to make NFC payments at more than 15,000 contactless POS terminals across the country... More
Optus launches NFC payments in Australia
Australian carrier Optus has teamed up with Visa and Heritage Bank to launch an NFC mobile payment service that lets customers load up to A$500 into a prepaid account and then make payments at any Visa contactless POS terminal... More
EcoCash takes mobile money to the point of sale
EcoCash, Africa’s second largest mobile money provider with 3.7m users, is to offer customers in Zimbawe a MasterCard debit card linked to their EcoCash wallet... More
Softcard picks Muppet mascot for online advertising campaign
US carrier mobile payments venture Softcard has unveiled Tappy, a mascot designed by the company behind The Muppets that will be used initially in an online advertising blitz reported to be valued at US$1.5m. More
Visa CEO: We may not charge a fee for tokenization
Visa will not charge a fee to card issuers making use of its tokenization service until at least the end of 2015 and may or may not charge a separate fee for the service in the future, CEO Charles Scharf has revealed at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2014 Banking & Financial Services Conference... More
MasterCard and Visa to create new security standard to replace passwords for online payments
MasterCard is working with Visa to create a new authentication standard for online payments that will gradually replace the 3D Secure protocol with “invisible authentication”, far fewer prompts for passwords and support for a range of biometric technologies... More
McDonald’s on mobile payments: We prefer to let our customers choose how they pay
McDonald’s sees accepting NFC mobile payments as part of its on-going customer service improvement remit, the fast food giant’s Anja Carroll has told NFC World+... More
Kili acquires NFC microSD pioneer DeviceFidelity
NFC-on-microSD pioneer DeviceFidelity has been acquired by Kili Technology, a payments processing solution provider which launched an mPOS “solution-on-a-chip” range last month... More
SimplyTapp raises US$6m to grow HCE
PARTNER NEWS: Host card emulation (HCE) specialist SimplyTapp has closed a US$6m Series B funding round... More
Canada plans new mobile payment regs
The Canadian government is preparing to give merchants the ability to refuse to accept a particular NFC payment service if it attracts higher than usual fees — should that situation ever arise in the future, a document obtained by the WSJ reveals... More
Powa raises $80m for US launch
Powa Technologies has raised US$80m from Wellington Management to launch its PowaTag mobile payments platform in the US... More
Zwipe reports biometric card pilot results
Four in ten (42%) of the 200 cardholders who took part in a trial of Zwipe’s biometric payment card conducted by Norway’s Sparebanken say they think the fingerprint security solution is more secure than using a PIN code to verify a transaction... More
Whole Foods reports 150k Apple Pay transactions
Whole Foods Market has processed more than 150,000 Apple Pay transactions since the mobile payment solution launched in October, the US supermarket chain has told NFC World+... More
Apple Pay boosts Google Wallet
Google Wallet has seen an uplift of 50% in transactions on a weekly basis since Apple Pay’s launch, with users almost doubling on a monthly basis “in the recent couple of months”, reports Ars Technica... More
Square processes a billion payments
US mobile payments provider Square has now processed a total of one billion payment transactions... More
Softcard to be on 100 phones by year’s end
US carrier joint venture Softcard’s NFC mobile payments service will be available on more than 100 devices by the end of the year... More
Dairy Queen expands mobile loyalty and payment test
US fast food chain Dairy Queen has expanded pilot testing of its myDQ mobile loyalty, offers and payments service to more than sixty locations in the states of Colorado and Nebraska ahead of a planned rollout of the solution to all its 4,500 US franchise locations... More
French banks to pilot HCE payments
Visa Europe has partnered with payment and transaction services provider Worldline to pilot NFC mobile payments using host card emulation (HCE) with four French banks in the first quarter of 2015... More