Contactless payments

The department of Transport for the West Midlands is looking at how to provide a smart ticketing system to ensure that contactless card users get the best rate on a journey.

Gromit Unleashed 2 will be incorporating contactless donation points along the art trail to aid the Bristol Children’s Hospital — a project that is as much a necessity as it is an innovation in the U.K.'s aggressively contactless environment.

The Australian state of Queensland has selected Cubic Corp. of San Diego to develop a mass-transit ticketing system that will support contactless payments and real-time rider account information for public transportation in the region surrounding Brisbane.

As contactless cards continue their momentum in the U.K., new use cases are popping up for the tap-and-go technology.

Royal Bank of Canada is one of three Canadian banks with a presence in the Caribbean, and is deploying contactless card readers throughout the region to ride a wave of digital payment adoption.

New Jersey’s commuter rail and bus system is joining the movement to add contactless payment options for commuters, which observers say could spark broader adoption of mobile payments across the U.S.

Wirecard and Enio, an Austria-based supplier of electric car charging stations throughout Europe, are collaborating to enable contactless payments at thousands of sites.

This month, Vancouver became the first Canadian city to commercially roll out open transit payments. But the city of Laval actually got a head start on Vancouver with a pilot project that is getting a positive reaction from riders.

Despite Canada's high penetration of contactless POS terminals and consumer affinity for the technology, the country has lagged behind nations such as the U.K. and Singapore in contactless payments. That is set to change as Canada's transit schemes launch contactless open-payment systems.

American Express has issued a series of deadlines for merchant acquirers in markets outside of the U.S. in an attempt to jolt the global migration.

Contactless payments have become increasingly popular in the U.K. over the past couple of years due to the advantages they offer in terms of speed and ease of payment — but despite this, much of the U.K. public does not trust the format.

Visa CEO Alfred Kelly is less publicly adversarial toward market rival PayPal than his predecessor Charlie Scharf, even as Visa's push for a "single button" for online payments seems to undermine PayPal's business model.

It's no surprise that London topped the chart of "Cashless Capitals" in a recent study, considering its status as a major fintech hub of the U.K. But this wasn't enough to make it the country's contactless capital.

Microchip implants could be considered the ultimate form of mobile payment — skipping the smartphone altogether in favor of giving people bionic abilities. And a small segment of the population is already lining up to try it out.

Because Google Pay is already accepted at numerous mainstream merchants and is the default mobile wallet for many Android smartphone owners, it stands a strong chance of easing the friction of enrollment in a contactless fare system.

Credit and debit cards aren't going away, but you're going to see a lot less of them. Here's how credit unions can still stay top of wallet, even as mobile wallets and P2P payments gain ground.

To see significant growth in NFC payments in the U.S. a movement to standardize terminals across merchants would be necessary, coupled with a willingness from consumers to test, trust and use the technology, writes Beatta McInerney, business development manager for payments at ScanSource.

U.S. card issuers are adding contactless technology to credit and debit cards — but they are doing so in slow, small steps.

The Olympics draw together fans from around the globe to cheer on their fellow citizens, and having such a diverse group of people in one spot can inspire companies to experiment with cutting-edge technologies.

As an industry, we owe it to our customers and end users to deliver banking and payments that function in real-time and meet their expectations, writes Paul Kobos, senior vice president of banking & payments for Gemalto.