Football fans attending the FIFA World Cup in Qatar will be able to authenticate payments for purchases at three coffee outlets with their face, using biometric technology being piloted by Visa and Qatar National Bank... More
The PCI Security Standards Council has published a flexible modular standard for accepting payments on a smartphone or other commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) mobile device that supports a variety of payment acceptance channels and customer verification methods including software point-of-sale (sPOS) contactless acceptance solutions... More
Fitbit users are now able to add Google Wallet to Sense 2 and Versa 4 smartwatches and then use their wearable to make contactless payments in 45 countries, including 7 of the 12 countries where Google Wallet is now available for the first time... More
Samsung Wallet has gone live in Qatar and South Africa, enabling users to store and use their digital payment, loyalty, membership and identity cards, digital keys, boarding passes and other credentials on their compatible Samsung Galaxy smartphone... More
The Bank of Korea (BOK) is to review additional central bank digital currency (CBDC) design options after its 10-month experiment to test a retail CBDC based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) revealed “limitations of scalability” such as slow processing times during periods of high transaction volume when compared with a more conventional centralised ledger database, the bank says... More
Qatar Central Bank is to launch a national contactless prepaid debit card that will enable both banked and unbanked citizens to make contactless payments at the point of sale, withdraw cash from ATMs and make online purchases... More
The total number of consumers globally making contactless mobile payments with a smartphone or other NFC-enabled device will exceed one billion for the first time by 2024, rising from 782m in 2022, according to a Juniper Research forecast... More
PARTNER NEWS: Italian cash register provider RCH has partnered with digital payments technology provider Dejamobile and international payments platform Market Pay to provide its customers with the ability to accept contactless payments on Android NFC devices... More
Société Générale customers with a business account in Morocco can now apply for a biometric bank card that enables them to authorise contactless payments of any amount with their fingerprint rather than using a PIN or any other form of authorisation... More
Customers of First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) in the United Arab Emirates can now apply for a biometric credit card — the first to be launched in the country — that enables users to verify both contact and contactless payments with their fingerprint and earn reward points that they can redeem at more than 3,500 locations across the UAE... More
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has begun testing a prototype wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) and will launch a pilot programme for a retail digital rupee with merchants and consumers in select locations “within a month”, the central bank says... More
One in ten consumers in the Nordic countries now prefer to make mobile payments at the point of sale, double the number who prefer to use cash (5%), making mobile payments the second most popular payment method in the region for the first time, according to figures from regional payments processor Nets... More
Turkey is planning to launch a central bank digital currency (CBDC) that will be integrated with the country’s digital identity system and the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey’s FAST instant payments service... More
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has unveiled a prototype two-tier central bank digital currency (CBDC) ecosystem that will enable end users to store digital HK dollars as either intermediated CBDC tokens or CBDC-backed stablecoins in a digital wallet and use them to carry out retail transactions... More
Japan-based payments network JCB is to run an in-store central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot that uses existing contactless payment cards, point of sale (POS) hardware and softPOS payment acceptance technology installed on mobile devices... More
Customers purchasing laptops, tablets, smartphones and accessories from a branch of Polish retail chain Komputronik in the city of Wroclaw can now pay for their purchases using a biometric payments system that uses a combination of iris and face recognition technology... More
Fans attending sports matches, concerts and other events at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena in the US state of Washington can now opt to pay for their purchases with their palm at three additional food and drink outlets across the venue... More
WeChat Pay users in China can now opt to authenticate payments with their palm at merchants that support the payment service’s new biometric WeChat Palm Payment solution... More
Customers of Danske Bank in Denmark can now add their Dankort debit card to Apple Pay and use it to make mobile payments using the country’s Dankort domestic payment system... More
Apple Pay has gone live in a number of shopping malls in Kuwait prior to a full rollout in the country “soon”, according to media reports... More