Users of Japanese rail operator JR East’s Suica stored value transit cards will soon be able to start collecting loyalty points when they use their account to pay for their journeys — and will receive four times as many points when they use Suica to make a payment with their mobile phone rather than a […]

Swift has published a new open banking API standard that “allows a payer’s bank to earmark funds for a purchase in advance, guaranteeing that the future payment will be honoured”. The publication of the Pre-Authorization API standard follows the release earlier this year of a Pay Later API standard designed to enable shoppers to select

Merchants in Poland are to be the first to pilot a new service that enables them to accept contactless payments of any amount “via a smartphone or tablet, in the same way a traditional payment terminal functions but with no additional equipment”. The pilot will use SoftPOS technology developed by Samsung Electronics and will be

NFC connectivity is to play a major role in the delivery of a new generation of cordless kitchen appliances which work in conjunction with wireless power transmitter hotspots built into kitchen work surfaces to replace the need for traditional plugs and cables. The new Ki Cordless Kitchen standard is being developed by the Wireless Power

Supermarket chain Sainsbury’s has added a manned till and two self-checkout stations to the London store it opened in April as the UK’s first checkout-free supermarket. Consumer take-up has been “as expected”, the retailer told Just-drinks, but “lines sometimes formed at a help-desk because some shoppers still wanted to pay by cash or card.” “Not

Public transportation users in Detroit, Michigan, can now use their mobile phone as well as the city’s new contactless transit cards to purchase time-based travel passes that work seamlessly across multiple transportation operators. The city’s new Dart service allows passengers to purchase travel passes in four-hour, 24-hour, seven-day and 31-day increments and then use them

A biometric payments system that uses the shape of a shopper’s hand to identify them at the point of sale (POS) is currently being tested by Amazon employees ahead of a planned pilot at “a handful” of Whole Foods supermarkets early next year, the New York Post reports. “Employees at Amazon’s New York offices are

A group of seven mobile payments service providers with a combined user base of 25 million people in nine European countries have formed a new association to deliver “interoperability of the mobile payment systems across national borders”. The European Mobile Payment Systems Association (EMPSA) is based in Zurich and chaired by Søren Mose, chairman of

A team of researchers from universities in the UK and China have developed a way to use standard machine embroidering equipment to add NFC capabilities to items of clothing so that the technology continues to work reliably even when the fabric is stretched out of shape by the wearer. The breakthrough involves combining a strain‐free