NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Apple has announced overdue plans to launch Apple Pay in China early next year, touting a list of 15 major banks that will enable customers to load their credit and debit cards in its Wallet app, including China’s big four state-owned banks. Meanwhile, Samsung followed with an announcement of its planned launch of Samsung Pay in China, which was also expected.
NFC Times Exclusive – SHANGHAI, China:China UnionPay is continuing negotiations with Apple and some sources told NFC Times it is gearing up for a planned launch of Apple Pay in China.
Payment network China UnionPay and China-based handset maker ZTE have disclosed an agreement to enable contactless payment on embedded chips in two of ZTE’s latest high-end Android phones.
China UnionPay has announced that 15 banks now have access to its TSM platform, while a total of 30 banks have signed a cooperation agreement to eventually use the platform.
China’s No. 2 mobile operator China Unicom, along with China Merchants Bank, today announced plans to launch an NFC payments service next month in Shanghai.
China’s giant mobile operator, China Mobile, and the country's big domestic payment network, China UnionPay, have signed an agreement to cooperate on mobile payment, including using SIM cards in NFC phones.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Five years ago next month, Transport for London introduced open-loop contactless payments across its transit network, including metro, trams and commuter rail, following an earlier launch on buses. The service now accounts for more than half of all pay-as-you-go journeys and has become a global showcase for the technology.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – While noting to financial analysts late Tuesday that Apple Pay is now approaching 1 billion transactions per month globally and is in 47 markets, perhaps Apple CEO Tim Cook’s most significant comments about Apple Pay this week was to again emphasize that Apple wants to enable users to routinely tap to pay for bus, subway and other transit rides with their iPhones and Apple Watches.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – China’s mega-mobile wallet providers have continued their rollouts of transit payments in China, with Tencent Holdings announcing Tuesday that two years after launching its first QR-code-based WeChat “Ride Code” service in Guangzhou, total users for its transit payments services has reached 100 million.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight –Transport for New South Wales, Australia, the authority that oversees transit in and around Sydney, has taken a step toward phasing out its closed-loop contactless Opal fare card, today extending nearly all of the discounts it offers on Opal to users of open-loop Visa- Mastercard- and American Express-branded contactless cards.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight– October will mark the fifth anniversary of the launch of Apple Pay in the U.S., Apple’s first country for its groundbreaking NFC payments service.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Following Apple’s imminent entry into the credit card business in the U.S. with its planned Apple Card, the tech giant is showing signs it is looking to roll out the branded credit card in a number of other countries, as well.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight –It was the fall of 2015, and interest in the Pays wallets was burgeoning. Google and Samsung had each launched their respective payments services in September of 2015 in the U.S., following introduction of Apple Pay a year earlier.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Apple Pay will offer support for Hong Kong’s popular closed-loop contactless transit and retail payments card Octopus later this year, adding a much-needed service to an Apple Wallet that launched three years ago in Hong Kong for credit and debit payments at retail.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – While Visa’s country office in Taiwan was touting the fact that Taiwan ranks as one of the top countries in Asia Pacific for acceptance and use of contactless payments only six months ago, that hasn’t stopped the big payments network from actively promoting QR code payments on the island nation, too.
NFC TIMES Exclusive –The mid-tier city of Vinnytsia in the Ukraine is rolling out its first transit smart cards for payment of fares on buses and trams this summer, replacing cash, which riders have used for years.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Japan’s popular 7-Eleven convenience store chain reported Thursday a major hack of its QR code-based mobile-payments app, but the breach appears to be due to poorly designed security protections in the app.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Two more large Nordic banks, Nordea and Swedbank, have launched contactless payments on analog watches, using technology from Swedish provisioning company Fidesmo that enables consumers to buy the watches and provision them with tokenized Mastercard-branded cards after the sale by tapping the watches on Android NFC phones.
