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: As the Isis joint venture gears up for its planned national rollout, NFC Times looks at the view on the ground in its pilot cities of Austin, Texas, and Salt Lake City, Utah, from the perspective of merchants and consumers.
The UK continues to expand its rollout of contactless, with Starbucks completing its deployment of contactless point-of-sale terminals at 550 coffee shops nationwide.
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.
Orange UK and Barclaycard have announced the availability of the popular Samsung Galaxy S III for their Quick Tap NFC payment service, as they seek to spur interest in their as yet little-used service.
MasterCard Worldwide hopes to expand access to PayPass contactless-mobile payment, especially to customers of small banks and credit unions, with its new partnership with mobile-banking software provider mFoundry.
The Starbucks coffee chain is the latest merchant to signal it will accept contactless payment in the United Kingdom, adding more momentum to the rollout there.
While NFC-based mobile payment could roll out by late this year, Starbucks, the world’s largest coffee shop chain, has made it clear it is not prepared to wait.
NFC Times Exclusive: As the Isis joint venture gears up for its planned national rollout, NFC Times looks at the view on the ground in its pilot cities of Austin, Texas, a
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Unlike in most developed countries in Europe and Asia, in the U.S., only a small percentage of the population regularly uses mass transit. But New York City is an exception, with more than 4 billion transit trips per year in the metropolitan area–seven times greater than in the next largest U.S. city in terms of transit use, Chicago.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight –Another one of Australia’s big four banks, National Australia Bank, has given in to pressure from customers and has agreed to support Apple Pay.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – U.S.-based sports and entertainment ticketing vendor Ticketmaster sees its new digital-ticketing technology–supporting bar codes and NFC–as a way to reduce fraud and stay in touch with both ticket purchasers and event attendees.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Japan’s mobile payments market is expanding, but the talk is not about NFC payments services, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay or the pioneering FeliCa wallet services originally pushed by NTT DoCoMo and rail operator JR East.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight –Singapore’s Land Transport Authority announced today it will begin accepting Visa-branded contactless cards to pay fares on trains and buses starting June 6, only two months after it launched its “SimplyGo” open-loop fare collection service with only Mastercard-branded cards.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – With U.S. banks planning to renew tens of millions of their EMV credit and debit cards this year with an added contactless interface, industry observers are naturally considering how the rollouts will affect adoption of NFC mobile wallets.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – The Rio de Janeiro Metro has launched its planned open-loop payments service, one of the first Latin American transit systems to accept bank cards–in this case, Visa credit cards–directly for payment of rides.
NFC TIMES Exclusive –One of the key battlegrounds for Apple, Google and Samsung as they seek more users for their respective Pays wallets is transit ticketing–with all three tech giants targeting both open-loop payments and–perhaps surprisingly–also closed-loop transit cards. (See table below).
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – With U.S. banks finally beginning to issue dual-interface EMV cards in significant numbers this year and more U.S. merchants accepting contactless and NFC payments, a key question becomes whether contactless card payment will help or hurt the prospects for what has generally been considered as disappointing take-up of NFC wallets.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Half of all domestic face-to-face transactions with Visa-branded cards globally–outside of the U.S.–are expected to be contactless within the next two months, with Visa reporting that contactless technology is maturing in numerous countries worldwide, mainly in Europe and Asia.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight –Contactless transactions in Canada topped 50% of all in-store card transactions for the first time ever during the first quarter of this year, said the country’s largest payments card processor, Moneris, this week.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Transactions from contactless bank cards in the U.S. will “quickly surpass” those from NFC phones by the end of 2020, despite cards being rolled out much later than NFC-enabled wallets, industry veteran Randy Vanderhoof, head of the Secure Technology Alliance industry trade group and the affiliated U.S. Payments Forum, told NFC Times.
