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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

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 – When it launches its SimplyGo service April 4, Singapore’s Land Transport Authority will become the first major transit authority in Asia outside of China to launch acceptance of open-loop payments of fares.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – Unlike transit authorities in the U.S. and Europe, transit agencies and the governments that control them in Asia often run their closed-loop fare-collection schemes as separate businesses.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Is NFC dead…again?

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Singapore is the latest country developing a national specification for QR code-based payments, seeking to reduce fragmentation of various QR code-based schemes.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Two of Singapore's major banks–both of which are participating in all three of the “Pays” wallets–Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Android Pay–are expanding their peer-to-peer payments services to in-store payments using QR codes.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Three of Singapore’s largest banks will soon launch mobile payments with Apple Pay, Apple disclosed Tuesday, as it launched Apple Pay in its sixth country.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight –  Singapore’s three major mobile operators are giving SIM-based NFC services another try, hoping that the offer of mobile transit fare collection will encourage more consumers to use their NFC phones to tap to pay, following the flop of the country’s NFC retail payments rollout that began in 2012.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Singapore's Land Transport Authority says it will hold a pilot later this year enabling customers to tap to pay for rides with contactless EMV credit and debit cards.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Despite other large banks outside of the U.S. using their own tokenization for early commercial launches of mobile payments with host card emulation, Singapore’s United Overseas Bank told NFC Times it decided to go with tokenization from Visa and soon from MasterCard for its new HCE-based service.