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
The number of people in Japan who use their smartphone to make mobile payments at the point of sale will reach 23.9 million — 21.5% of the population — by the end of this year, up from 19.1 million in 2019, according to an eMarketer forecast... More
PARTNER NEWS: NXP is adding support for FeliCa, the Japanese variant of NFC, to its NFC chipsets, beginning with a new PN81 series... More
Swiss luxury watchmaker Swatch has launched its Swatch Bellamy NFC payments watch in Brazil in partnership with Visa in time for the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games. More
PARTNER NEWS: A new blog post from digital security giant Gemalto explores the role of NFC-enabled wearables at sporting events and their potential to banish so-called “paper ticket syndrome”... More
Athletes at this year’s Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games will be given an NFC payments ring linked to a Visa account that will let them make purchases by tapping their hand against contactless terminals. More
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
PARTNER NEWS: Digital security giant Gemalto is to provide its mobile payment solutions to Dai Nippon Printing (DNP), an NFC technology supplier and solution provider for financial institutions in Japan... More
Visa has shown off a proof of concept NFC wristband in San Francisco, demonstrating how it could be used for making payments at the Rio 2016 Olympics next year... More
Visa is making multiple efforts towards a “mainstream launch” of contactless and mobile payments in the UK in 2013, Marc O’Brien, managing director of Visa UK & Ireland has told a meeting of the Westminster eForum, Marketing Week reports... More
Samsung has announced that an NFC version of the Galaxy S III Mini is now available... More
“The response has been extremely positive and our priority now is on turning that enthusiasm into commercial mobile payment deployments across Europe,” says Visa’s Mary Carol Harris, adding that “we recognise that the journey is a marathon, not a sprint.” More
1,000 Samsung Galaxy S III NFC phones equipped with a Visa mobile payments app are being distributed to “key stakeholders and decision makers” for the London 2012 Olympics, where all points of sale will be equipped to handle contactless payments — and NFC World has been testing out one of the limited edition devices. More
A new ticketing infrastructure designed to support payments via open-loop contactless cards and NFC phones won’t now arrive in time for the Olympics, TfL has revealed. More
The payments network and the phone maker will be issuing limited edition Samsung Galaxy S III handsets loaded with a Visa NFC payments app to athletes and other VIPs during the London 2012 Games. More
The newly announced successor to Samsung’s best selling Galaxy S II features NFC as standard and includes a new file transfer service that enables users to easily connect together two devices via NFC and automatically transfer large video and other files via WiFi Direct. More
The European Commission has opened an in-depth investigation into the planned NFC joint venture between Everything Everywhere, Telefónica and Vodafone UK which will delay launch until after the London Olympics and casts doubts over the timetable for the introduction of similar projects in a number of other European countries. More
Visa and Samsung are to demonstrate an NFC mobile payment service for the London 2012 Olympic Games at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week... More
87% of contactless cardholders in the UK, Poland and Turkey believe contactless cards will be “instrumental in bringing mobile contactless payments to market in the near future,” according to Visa Europe‘s latest Contactless Barometer survey... More
The UK will be the next country to get Google Wallet, following its US launch in October 2011, according to Les Echos... More