Consumers purchasing specially marked bottles of wine produced by the Devil’s Corner winery in Tasmania will be able to enter a promotion and win rewards by tapping an NFC chip in the label or scanning a QR code... More
QR Codes
Care home pilots biometric digital health passport
Staff at the Warren Manor care facility in Blackpool in the UK are piloting a digital passport that enables them to verify their Covid-19 vaccination, test or recovery status when they arrive at their workplace by scanning their finger... More
Amazon opens its first cashierless store outside US in London
Amazon has opened its first cashierless grocery store outside the US on London’s Ealing Broadway, enabling consumers to access the store and pay for their purchases by downloading a QR code to their mobile device and scanning it at the shop entrance... More
Sofia rolls out single journey QR mobile tickets across public transportation network
Public transport users in Sofia can now buy and store single journey QR code e-tickets on their mobile device which they can validate for travel on metro, bus, tram and trolleybus services across the Bulgarian capital’s transit network... More
Israel rolls out vaccine certification app
Israeli citizens who have received two doses of Covid-19 vaccine or recovered from the illness can now prove their status using a government-issued Green Pass vaccine certification app on their mobile devices... More
Delhi Metro to roll out mobile and contactless ticketing across entire network
Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) is to implement an upgraded contactless ticketing system across its entire network, enabling passengers to pay for their journeys via QR, an EMV bank card or a RuPay-enabled National Common Mobility Card (NCMC)... More
Japanese convenience store trials face and palm biometrics for checkout-free shopping
The Green Leaves+ shop-and-go store in the Yokohama Techno Tower Hotel in Japan is piloting a biometrics-enabled checkout-free service that allows customers to enter the store by verifying their identity with just their face and a swipe of their palm... More
Chinese consumers now make three mobile payments every day
Chinese consumers made an average of three mobile payments a day during 2020, while 98% of the Chinese population consider mobile payments to be their most frequently used transaction method, an increase of five percentage points on last year, a new survey reveals... More
PBOC to launch third digital yuan trial in Shenzhen
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) is to follow its pilots of NFC-based contactless digital currency payments with the distribution of a further 20m digital yuan (US$3.1m) in a third ‘red envelope’ lottery to be held in the city of Shenzhen... More
Vaccine credentials coalition to develop interoperable digital Covid-19 passport
A coalition of technology and healthcare providers in the US has launched an initiative to develop a solution that will enable individuals to store and access their Covid-19 vaccination records in their digital wallet “in a secure, verifiable and privacy preserving way”... More
Agricultural Bank of China pilots central bank digital currency ATMs
The Agricultural Bank of China has launched pilot ATMs that enable customers in Shenzhen to deposit and withdraw money in the form of digital yuan, the country’s central bank digital currency (CBDC)... More
Juniper forecasts 2.2bn QR code payment users by 2025
The number of people using QR code payment services globally will rise from 1.5 billion in 2020 to more than 2.2 billion in 2025, representing close to one in three (29%) of all the world’s mobile phone users, Juniper Research predicts... More
MTR rolls out QR code ticketing in Hong Kong
Passengers using Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR) will soon be able to travel on the system’s heavy rail network by generating a single-use QR code ticket on their mobile phone that they can scan at station turnstiles... More
Israel begins rollout of national account-based mobile ticketing system
Passengers on bus services across Israel can now use a single mobile app to get travel information, plan their journeys and pay for their fares using an account-based ticketing system that charges their account at the end of the month for all the journeys they have made... More
Carrefour introduces mobile self-checkout in UAE
Customers in Carrefour stores run by Majid Al Futtaim in the United Arab Emirates can now scan their purchases and pay for them in-store using the Mobile Scan&Go feature integrated into the retailer’s app... More
Huawei Pay expands to South Africa
Consumers in South Africa with compatible smartphones can now use Huawei Pay to make mobile payments by scanning QR codes compatible with the Zapper scan-to-pay payments platform... More
Payconiq rolls out cross-border QR mobile payments service in Europe
Users of Payconiq-supported mobile payment apps in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg can now make QR-enabled mobile payments and P2P transfers across all three Benelux countries... More
Japanese airline turns to mobile payments to boost revenues during Covid-19
Frequent flyers with All Nippon Airways (ANA) will soon be able to make in-store purchases and accumulate air miles by using a QR code-enabled mobile payments service that the Japanese airline is to launch “amid shrinking travel demand due to the coronavirus outbreak,” Japan Today reports... More
Survey: 4 in 10 US consumers open to receiving offers via NFC, QR and SMS
More than a third (38%) of US consumers intending to shop at brick-and-mortar retail outlets on Black Friday and Cyber Monday say they are interested in discounts and offers made via out-of-home (OOH) advertising signage that uses QR codes, NFC and SMS text messages, according to a new survey... More