“Indonesia’s central bank, Bank Indonesia (BI), officially imposed the QR code standardization called QRIS (Indonesian Standard QR Code) on January 1. This means that all mobile payment providers must replace their QR code with QRIS for easier transactions.” Read the rest of Indonesia begins EMV QR mobile payments rollout at NFCW.

“Some people have the Express Transit feature enabled, but are still using their MetroCard to pay for rides. While swiping their MetroCard, their iPhones are somehow coming into contact with the reader, either because they were holding it in their hands or through a pocket or purse, the MTA suspects.” Read the rest of Apple

“On February 10, Caltrain will launch Caltrain Mobile, the rail agency’s official mobile ticketing application that allows riders to purchase and activate tickets from their smart phone devices… The app offers One-Way, Day Pass and Zone Upgrade digital tickets for adults and passengers who qualify for discounted fare.” Read the rest of Caltrain to introduce

Visa is to acquire Plaid for US$5.3bn, in a move that CEO Al Kelly says “will put us at the epicentre of the fintech world, expanding our total addressable market and accelerating our long-term revenue growth trajectory”. Plaid “makes it easy for people to securely connect their financial accounts to the apps they use to

Visa has unveiled Tap to Phone, a new software-only solution that enables merchants to accept contactless payments on Android NFC mobile phones, without the need for any additional hardware. The solution is currently undergoing pilot testing in seven countries with five more to be added “over the next several months”. “Today, billions of people expect

A new privacy controls section now lets users of Samsung Pay in the US opt to prevent the company from selling their data to “Samsung Pay Partners”, XDA Developers reports. “Some Samsung Pay functions won’t work when ‘do not sell’ is enabled,” users are informed when they turn on the option. The option has been

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is to add support for “all remaining fare options, including unlimited ride passes, reduced fares, student fares, and more” to its Omny contactless payments service from next year. Omny has been used to pay for more than 5m journeys since its launch in May 2019 — but only full-fare,

A survey of more than 150,000 Chinese digital payment users has found that two-thirds have come across deceptive QR codes and 40.8% have had their codes surreptitiously forwarded to other people in the past year. The Payment and Clearing Association of China’s 2019 Mobile Payments Survey also found that 67.2% of respondents have had their

The NFC Forum has released four new specifications designed to improve “the robustness and communications speed for the over two billion NFC-enabled devices, like smartphones, in use today”. Digital Protocol Technical Specification Version 2.2, Type 2 Tag to Type 5 Tag Technical Specification Version 1.1, Activity Technical Specification Version 2.1 and Profiles Technical Specification Version