PARTNER NEWS: HID Global is using Cilab’s ci230 high-speed testing suite to reduce testing bottlenecks and standardise its NFC test results across its labs around the world — and is gaining a positive return on its investment in the equipment in less than a year, engineering director Hans-Juergen Pirch has told NFC World. HID Global

The Central Bank of The Bahamas has extended its central bank digital currency pilot to the island of Abaco and revealed that the new Sand Dollar currency will include support for offline functionality. The Sand Dollar pilot lets citizens use a digital version of the Bahamian dollar to make payments and transfer funds using their

Omny contactless card payment availability is being expanded to all local buses in Manhattan this month, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has announced. “The expansion to Manhattan local buses represents a dramatic increase in points where it’s possible to use Omny to make free transfers between subways and buses, which is made fast and

Payments standards body EMVCo has extended its security evaluation methodologies and processes to include support for IoT products and solutions, “enabling emerging solutions and devices to be evaluated quickly and efficiently”. “Device hardware evaluations are playing an increasingly important role in IoT assessments across various IoT payment use cases, security frameworks and emerging compliance models,”

Nigeria’s Access Bank is to introduce a payments system that uses a combination of facial recognition and artificial intelligence to let customers make purchases at retail stores, Ventures Africa reports. The new FacePay platform “enables more convenient payments in merchant locations and faster (withdrawals and transfers) in Access Bank branches,” the publication explains. Read the

Digital wallets will be used to pay for ecommerce transactions valued at more than US$3tn a year by 2023, a new study has found. Overall, the global eCommerce market will grow to US$5.9tn by 2023, the Worldpay from FIS 2020 Global Payments Report predicts, with digital/mobile wallets “set to be the online payment method of

Google has agreed to pay Transport for London (TfL) £2m (US$2.56m) for the right to place Google Pay branding on all of London Underground’s 5,686 tap in/out card readers for a year. “Under the contract, TfL’s ‘obligations’ include removing the existing yellow covers on all 5,686 readers across the network, swapping them with Google’s labels

Minecraft developer Mojang is to launch a range of NFC-enabled Minecraft figurines that work with its new Minecraft Earth augmented reality game to let players access a range of character-specific boosts and power-ups. The NFC figurines will be produced by Mattel, the toy giant which already uses NFC for its Hot Wheels ID game and