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 – The first contactless payments wearables resulting from UK-based Barclays partnerships with seven mostly analog watchmakers are beginning to roll out, with more planned–all using the bank’s bPay contactless chips and payments service.
NFC TIMES Exclusive – Google has signed up 640,000 small merchants in India to use its mobile payments service, Tez, a Google spokesman told NFC Times.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight –Vancouver is the latest major city to enable riders to tap to pay fares with contactless bank cards, including card credentials loaded into such NFC-enabled mobile payments services as Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Walmart Inc. has ended a trial of its Mobile Express Scan & Go app in its Walmart stores in the U.S., which had enabled shoppers to scan their items themselves and pay with a stored credit or debit card, then leave the store, after having a greeter scan a bar code in their apps to briefly check the receipt.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Another major Chinese city is accepting QR code-based payments for transit fare collection, with riders of the Shenzhen Metro now able to use WeChat Pay to cover the fares.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Germany’s largest bank, which announced plans Monday to pilot a new payments system for airlines that would enable travelers to buy tickets without pulling out their credit or debit cards, is also planning to expand the scheme to other industries, a bank spokesman told NFC Times.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Apple said the number of Apple Pay users doubled globally while transactions tripled during the last quarter, but the company did not release many details explaining reasons for the increases and again released no actual figures on Apple Pay usage.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Transport for London this week was again trumpeting its move to open-loop fare collection with contactless credit and debit cards and applications on NFC phones–noting that contactless payments now accounts for half of all pay-as-you-go metro and rail rides in and around the UK’s capital.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight –Major card networks Visa and Mastercard hope a new technical framework for online transactions they are backing from their jointly owned EMVCo specifications group will help them keep more transactions on their networks, amid growing competition for mobile and other digital payments and lackluster take-up of the networks’ respective online digital wallets, Visa Checkout and Masterpass.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Struggling wearables maker Fitbit on Monday began selling its second smartwatch, the Fitbit Versa, supporting its NFC-enabled Fitbit Pay service, but not all versions of the new device support NFC in the U.S.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Both Ant Financial and Tencent Holdings have used their hundreds of millions of users, ready access to Chinese bank accounts, billions of yuan in subsidies for merchants and consumers and protected market status in China against Western competitors to build a combined mobile payments business valued in the trillions of U.S. dollars in transactions.
