It will be three or four years before NFC-based payment becomes commonplace in smartphones—but those players that want to take advantage of the trend had better start partnering today.
FirstGroup, which bills itself as the largest bus and rail operator in the United Kingdom, is following Transport for London's lead in planning to accept bank cards, as well as NFC phones, directly to pay fares.
NXP Semiconductors has announced it is supplying the NFC chip for the Android phone launched this summer by Turkish operator Turkcell and made by Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei.
Chinese social-networking site Jiepang has expanded its use of NFC, and has announced a tie-in with Nokia and the handset maker’s new line of affordable NFC-enabled smartphones.
Update: Nokia today launched three new NFC-enabled Symbian smartphones, along with yet another update to its Symbian operating system, but the handset maker told NFC Times it will not support secure elements on its Symbian NFC phones until the first half of 2012.
Research in Motion has launched a new Blackberry handset with built-in NFC support, part of its lower-end Curve series. It not yet clear which telcos will introduce NFC services with the phone and when, however.
German national railway, Deutsche Bahn, plans to roll out its NFC-based ticketing service, Touch&Travel, to its long-distance stations throughout Germany this year, a spokesman confirmed to NFC Times.
China’s fast-growing bank card network China UnionPay is making its move this year into mobile payment–and may try to outflank China’s big mobile operators by pushing for microSD cards to carry its application rather than SIM cards or other secure elements in NFC phones.
Nokia has finally released its update to the Symbian operating system, which will turn on the NFC functionality in its C7 smartphone that started shipping 10 months ago.
Nokia is participating in the first launch of an NFC tag-reading campaign as part of its NFC Hub service, helping to equip two museums in London with tags and the statistics to measure their use.
U.S.-based Narian Technologies has announced the launch of its first set of NFC applications, targeting a range of merchant categories with services that it says will complement the payment transaction.
German mobile operators Telekom Deutschland, Vodafone Germany and Telefónica Germany today announced an agreement to form a joint venture to expand their mpass mobile payment service to the physical point of sale using NFC technology.
Google’s acquisition of Motorola's mobile phone business would boost the roll out of phones supporting NFC and the Google Wallet, though not by a huge amount and not in the short run, say observers.
Chinese bank card network China UnionPay has announced plans to introduce a mobile-payment service using an NFC-enabled Android phone from Taiwan-based handset maker HTC.
U.S.-based Texas Instruments has launched its long-anticipated NFC chip, targeting a range of devices, from medical equipment to hotel door locks, but not mobile phones–at least not yet.
Visa Inc. has announced a major new migration plan to encourage U.S. merchants to support EMV chip technology, including incentives for accepting contactless cards and NFC-phone payments.
NXP Semiconductors' sharply lower forecast for NFC phone shipments for 2011 comes as little surprise to many, who point to delays in handset shipments and failure by many mobile operators to firm up their NFC business plans.
Chinese consumers will conduct $8 billion worth of contactless-mobile payments in 2014, up from about $900 million in payments this year, forecasts research firm ABI Research.
Research in Motion today confirmed shipping dates for its first NFC-enabled phones, the Bold 9900 and closely related 9930 models, which RIM said would begin to become available from mobile carriers worldwide later this month.
Turkish operator Turkcell has announced it has launched a pilot among employees of the first nonbank-issued application for its NFC mobile wallet, enabling users to tap their phones to redeem food vouchers at restaurants and cafés.
A growing number of UK consumers, 44%, recognize the contactless logo at the point of sale, according to a recent survey by Barclays bank and its acquiring and credit card arm, Barclaycard.
NXP Semiconductors, the largest supplier of NFC chips, has lowered its projection for total NFC phone shipments for 2011 to 40 million or less–substantially lower than the 70 million it had been projecting.
California state officials have released a list of seven bidders it intends to award contracts to for the supply of core technology for the state’s ambitious plan to help more than 300 transit agencies roll out open-loop fare payments statewide.
The Moscow Department of Transport has announced it is launching a test of its planned “MultiTransport” mobility-as-a-service platform, which will enable users to plan and pay for rides on the Moscow Metro and other public transit, along with taxis. The city said it is planning to add other transport modes, including car-share and bike and scooter rental.
A commercial bus company serving Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, has launched contactless open-loop payments on board its new electronic buses, and reports say officials and bankers would like to see contactless EMV payments expanded to other modes of transport.
Moscow Metro has 45,000 users for its Face Pay service since launching its rollout of facial recognition fare-payments in mid-October, the transit agency said today, in releasing more details about how the service works.
Updated: The Spokane Transit Authority in Washington state confirmed that its new fare-collection system will include contactless open-loop payments–with a beta test planned for next October, a spokesman told NFC Times' sister publication Mobility Payments.
Plans by Transport for New South Wales, Australia’s largest transit agency, to launch a trial enabling users to plan, book and pay for multimodal rides is the next step toward the agency’s long-ter
The UK government’s plan to equip 700 rail stations over the next three years to accept contactless open-loop payments is a major initiative, as it seeks to replicate the success of London’s contactless pay-as-you go fare payments system elsewhere in the country–a goal that has proved elusive in the past.
A fourth city in Finland is beginning to roll out contactless open-loop payments, with “more in the pipeline,” according to one supplier on the project, making the Nordic country one of the latest hotspots for the technology.
Moscow Metro is recruiting more users to test its “Virtual Troika” card in two NFC wallets, those supporting Google Pay and Samsung Pay, as one of the world’s largest subway operators continues to seek more ways for its customers to pay for rides.
The Central Ohio Transit Authority, or COTA, officially launched its new digital-payments service Monday, including a fare-capping feature that the agency estimates will cost it $1.8 million per year in lost fare revenue, the agency confirmed to Mobility Payments.
While the trend today is for more transit agencies to introduce open-loop fare payments, closed-loop cards, either in physical form or dematerialized on smartphones and wearables, will be with us for many years to come–though perhaps in a reduced role. That’s according to a recent panel discussion at the Mobility Payments Asia Pacific 2021 conference.
Andy Taylor, senior director, global strategy for Cubic Transportation Systems contended that the MaaS market is at a crossroads and could fail if it doesn’t change course, including putting cities and public agencies firmly in the “driving seat” of MaaS apps.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – As the Covid-19 crisis sows fear among mass transit customers and causes ridership on buses, trains and trams to crash, there is heightened interest in mobile ticketing and other electronic fare payments as a way to ease the concerns and help coax wary riders to return.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – With Switzerland’s No. 2 bank, Credit Suisse, expected to participate in Apple Pay, the U.S.-based tech giant continues to chip away at resistance among major European banks to joining its digital payments service.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – With the National Football League kicking off its season in a few weeks in the U.S., fans will be using NFC, QR codes and perhaps ultrasonic signals on their mobile devices, in addition to tapping contactless-enabled paper tickets, to attend football games and other events at all 31 NFL stadiums.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Most issuers in the U.S. have so far held back from rolling out contactless or dual-interface cards, but merchant acceptance has been quietly building over the past few years, despite some large U.S. retailers balking at accepting contactless cards and NFC-enabled devices.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight –Payments industry backers suggest that U.S. banks could have an incentive to begin contactless rollouts soon, but in the absence of deadlines from the major payments networks, which are rapidly approaching in other markets, there's no guarantee of rollouts in the U.S. on the horizon.
NFC TIMES Exclusive –As the digital payments ecosystem moves into 2018, it is dealing with many of the same unfulfilled promises, works in progress and unfinished business as in 2017.
NFC TIMES Exclusive – As more U.S. merchants launch their own payments apps, some seem positioned to offer serious competition to Apple Pay and the other NFC “Pays” wallets.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight –Promoters of contextual commerce are looking to a range of connected devices, including smart appliances and such home hubs as Alexa–along with a host of mobile devices–to enable consumers to pay in almost every context. But many challenges remain for what could become a “very disjointed” array of payment options, experts say.
