Visa confirms mobile payments trial with Galaxy S3 at London Olympics
Visa has confirmed that it will showcase mobile NFC payments at the London Olympics using Samsung’s new Galaxy S3.
Samsung even plans to create a limited edition handset for the occasion, but the bad news is that only athletes are being invited to take part in the trial.
The NFC payments are enabled using Visa payWave, an app that allows consumers to use their smartphone to pay for goods at the point of sale simply by touching it on a card reader.
LivingSocial launches its own Visa reward credit card
While daily deals giant Groupon deals continues to struggle with being a publicly-traded company, its biggest competitor, Amazon-backed LivingSocial, continues to try to prove that the daily deal model is viable when done right.
One of the biggest challenges in doing that is getting daily deal customers to return to the merchants that lured them in with a bargain.
Indeed, much of the criticism that has emerged around the daily deal model is that many if not most daily deal customers hop from business to business in search of the best deal. In the worst cases, this leaves some merchants with losses they can ill-afford.
Visa and La Caixa make Barcelona contactless for MWC
A new deal between Visa and Spanish bank La Caixa will see contactless payments rolled out across Barcelona.
One million NFC-enabled cards will be issued, 500 ATMs upgraded and 15,00 new point-of-sale terminals installed around the city.
PayPal mobile payments surge to $4bn
In late 2009, PayPal president John Donahoe indicated that he believed online payments should account for 20% of global payments, even though, at the time, they accounted for just 5%. His goal: find ways to grow that number.
There are a lot of ways of doing that, but none may be as promising as mobile payments.
Mastercard throws weight behind EU Green Paper on mobile payments
In response to the European Commission’s Green Paper on electronic payments, published today, Mastercard is the first major payment company to officially lend support to the campaign.
The goal of the paper is to expand electronic payments to help European businesses grow, and consumers to shop easily and safely online, instore and via their mobile devices.
Visa enables NFC payments in LG, Samsung and RIM phones
Visa has announced that its NFC payment system is now certified for use in LG, Samsung and RIM smartphones.
The payWave application allows consumers to use their mobile to pay for goods at the point-of-sale.
Online retailers prepare for 'Mega Monday'
Retailers are predicting that today will be the biggest online shopping day of the year as consumers ramp up their Christmas spending.
Visa, which labelled the annual shopping event ‘Mega Monday’, is expecting £303m to be spent online in the UK using its cards.
This equates to £3,500 per second, a 12% increase on 2010.
Visa launching P2P payments, but is it a decade late?
Visa's motto may be "More people go with Visa," but when it comes to payments between people, Visa and other major credit card associations are largely absent.
The market for P2P payments is instead dominated by newer players, such as PayPal, which has been around for less than a decade and a half. And more recently, a slew of startups is looking to create new markets and take advantage of untapped niches.
In mobile payments, credit card companies might be a third wheel
If there's one thing major mobile carriers don't like to do, it's work together. But that appears to be what they're doing in the mobile payment space. Considering how tight the market is, that's a move credit card companies might not be too happy about. Because while credit card companies may need carriers to get into mobile payments, they may also soon learn those same carriers don't need them.
MasterCard courts developers, but should it?
Online payments behemoth PayPal thinks developers are key in its quest for world domination. Late last year, it launched a portfolio of new APIs that PayPal hopes will give developers the ability to create applications that extend PayPal's footprint into markets in which it believes its payment solutions could be better utilized.
But if the credit card associations have their way, PayPal will have to compete for the best developers.
