Niemann Foods has installed a Bluetooth beacon marketing platform provided by Birdzi in eight of its County Market stores and plans to roll out the solution to all its 45 County Market locations in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri in the coming months... More
Pilot
Chase discusses Apple Pay and its own mobile wallet plans
More than a million JPMorgan Chase cards have now been activated for use on Apple Pay since the mobile payment service launched last year, the bank has revealed, and 69% of the activated cards are credit cards... More
MasterCard reports on HCE payments tests in 15 countries
MasterCard is currently conducting more than 25 host card emulation (HCE) projects in 15 countries, the payments network has announced, with multiple issuers now moving close to commercial deployments... More
First Tech to run biometric triple test
First Tech Federal Credit Union is to run a pilot later this year in partnership with MasterCard that will see cardholders being given the ability to authenticate and verify their transactions using a combination of face, voice and fingerprint verification... More
LA Metro to get Bluetooth beacons
The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority is planning to pilot Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons in Los Angeles’ Union Station to track a commuter’s journey and send out relevant information directly to their smartphone... More
Google testing new payments service?
Google is testing a service called Plaso “that allows people carrying Android phones to pay at retailers like Papa John’s and Panera Bread by saying their initials to employees at the cash register,” The Information reports, citing “four people who have been involved in or briefed about it.” The pilot has been live since “last fall”... More
MassDOT tests mobile tickets
The Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) has begun a pilot test of BusPlus, a mobile ticketing service developed by Bytemark that provides customers of intercity private bus operators the ability to purchase and store transit passes on their mobile devices... More
USAA adds face and voice verification to mobile banking app
Financial services group the United Services Automobile Association (USAA) is to enable its members to use biometric authentication, including face and voice verification, to log in to their accounts on their smartphone... More
Spain pilots contactless ID cards
The Government of Spain is piloting a contactless ID card in Lleida that can be read using an NFC device... More
Edenred pilots NFC payments
Meal voucher provider Edenred France is piloting NFC payments with Orange and MasterCard to let users pay for meals with their smartphones in restaurants affiliated to Ticket Restaurant and equipped with a contactless terminal... More
US mall operator tests BLE beacons
US mall operator Taubman is piloting BLE beacons for an indoor navigation service at its Mall at University Town Center in Sarasota, Florida, with plans to roll out the platform to other properties throughout the year... More
Chick-fil-A rolls out mobile payments
Fast food chain Chick-fil-A has rolled out mobile payments to all of its US restaurants, with the exception of licensed locations, following a pilot that began in June 2014... More
Semble picks Gemalto for NFC in NZ
Semble, the NFC payments joint venture between New Zealand’s carriers and the Paymark payments network, is using Gemalto’s Allynis Trusted Service Hub to secure over-the-air provisioning of payment credentials to users’ NFC devices... More
Norwich buses get Bluetooth beacons that deliver offers to passengers on the move
UK transportation operator FirstGroup has installed Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons on buses in the city of Norwich to help deliver content and offers to passengers’ smartphones... More
Brooklyn Nets launch mobile wallet
American Express has partnered with New York basketball team Brooklyn Nets to pilot Brooklyn eWallet, a digital payment solution integrated into the team’s mobile app that lets fans buy food and drink with their mobile phone at any event held at the Barclays Center arena... More
Sainsbury’s tests mobile shopping and payments app
UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s is to pilot a mobile shopping app that allows customers to build a virtual basket of favourite products from anywhere before they visit a store, get directions when they arrive at the store to find the items in their virtual basket, scan selected items as they shop, and then check out and pay with their mobile phone... 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
Costa Rican bank adds face biometrics to mobile app
Costa Rican bank Grupo Mutual has worked with biometric technology provider FacePhi to build face recognition into its mobile banking app... More
MCX CEO confirms plans to include bank cards in CurrentC wallet
MCX CEO Dekkers Davidson has outlined more of the consortium’s plans for its CurrentC mobile wallet in a keynote presentation at the Money2020 event in Las Vegas, confirming that banks will be able to add open loop payment cards to the service when it goes live in 2015... 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