The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has launched a standard for the generation of QR codes in the country’s retail payments sector as the first phase of a nationwide rollout of a universal QR code payments system... More
Residents of Colombia will soon be able to use an updated version of their digital national identity card — known as La Cédula Digital Colombiana — stored on their Apple or Android smartphone as a passport when travelling to eight other South American countries... More
The NFC Forum’s Tag NFC Data Exchange Format Exchange Protocol (TNEP) Specification and an updated version of the Connection Handover Technical Specification (CH 1.5) have been formally approved and adopted, the standards organisation has announced... More
The Car Connectivity Consortium has announced the completion of an NFC-based digital key specification designed to deliver “a standardized ecosystem that enables mobile devices to store, authenticate, and share digital keys for vehicles in a secure, privacy-preserving way that works everywhere”... More
PARTNER NEWS: STMicroelectronics has received NFC Forum certification for the ST25R3916, a high performance NFC universal device and EMVCo reader that is fully compliant with ISO 14443A/B, ISO 15693, ISO 18092, Felica and NFC Forum standards... More
Calypso Networks Association (CNA) and OSPT Alliance have begun work on the creation of a single, global open standard for transit ticketing that will leverage “the unique strengths” of both the Calypso and the Cipurse standards... More
PCI Security Standards Council publishes new standard for contactless payments — PCI Security Standards Council — “The primary elements of a CPoC solution include: a Cots [commercial off-the-shelf] device with an embedded NFC interface to read the payment card or payment device; a validated payment acceptance software application that runs on the merchant Cots device initiating a contactless transaction; and back-end systems that are independent from the Cots device and support monitoring, integrity checks and payment processing.”
American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Visa have gone live with an online checkout service that lets merchants add a single buy button to their sites to accept payments from any of the networks’ cardholders — without them first needing to create an account with the merchant or enter detailed payment data... More
In depth: The fight for dominance in China’s mobile payment market — Caixin Global — “Under the plan, by the end of 2021 all merchants will be able to use one universal barcode to facilitate transactions through different payment service providers, including banks, Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay. Currently, payment providers issue different barcodes that can be used only on their own services.”
Swift has published a new open banking API standard that “allows a payer’s bank to earmark funds for a purchase in advance, guaranteeing that the future payment will be honoured”... More