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.
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
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.
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.
As more transit agencies introduce open-loop fare payments, interest is starting to grow in use of white-label EMV cards that agencies can issue in place of proprietary closed-loop cards for riders who don’t have bank cards or don’t want to use them to pay fares.
Skånetrafiken, the transit agency serving one of Sweden’s largest counties, announced today it has expanded its contactless open-loop payments service to include the Express Mode feature for Apple Pay.
Two more bus operators in Hong Kong on Saturday launched acceptance of open-loop contactless fare payments, with both also accepting QR code-based mobile ticketing–as the near ubiquitous closed-loop Octopus card continues to see more competition.
Touting it as the largest rollout of biometric payments in the world, Moscow Metro launched its high-profile “Face Pay” service Friday, as expected, and predicted that 10% to 15% would regularly us
Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, whose metropolitan area is home to more than 30 million people, is notorious for its stifling traffic congestion. In response, the government metro and light-rail networks and now it is funding an expansion of the fare-collection system to enable more multimodal payments and to build a mobility-as-a-service platform.
Transit agencies that have rolled out open-loop contactless payments are seeing growing use of NFC wallets to pay fares, as Covid-wary passengers see convenience in tapping their phones or wearables to pay.
