©Business Insider Singapore The payment industry covers quite well the market of consumer to merchant payments. Standards are established, and leading players are known and identified. Once this is done, players attempt to extend to other market segments. Peer to peer is an obvious choice, and payments to charities and informal businesses is another one. Last week, a partnership between iZettle and the City of London lead them to announce that some street performers in London were now able to accept payments by contactless cards. However, even if such an announcement makes the news in the UK, the invisible revolution is coming from China! The model set up by Chinese major payment operators W
It is a euphemism to say that NFC has not fulfilled its promises. A few years ago, all of us in the industry, anticipated a world in which mobile phones would replace payment cards in the vast majority of transactions. We all have to admit we were wrong: it did not happen this way, at least not yet. However, there are still good news coming in the way of NFC deployment. Last week, Cubic Transportation Systems, and Vancouver's transportation authority, TransLink announced the fare collection system in Vancouver now supports direct payment with contactless Visa and MasterCard cards as well as NFC payments using Apple Pay, Google Pay or Samsung Pay wallets. This new capability comes in addition
After years of preparation, GDPR D-Day finally happens! Probably the most visible part of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enforcement is the hundreds of emails we have all received asking us to reconfirm we agree on receiving information from numerous companies, some we know quite well and want to remain in touch with, and others we have completely forgotten about. Next step is to see what is going to happen to our inbox in the next few days: will all spam stop instantly like magic? At least, if GDPR already leads to less cluttered email, it will already have been a success. More globally, GDPR aims at bringing a healthier personal data governance and reinforcing general publi
For those who have been observing the mPOS market for a while, the news came as a shock: Paypal is acquiring Sweden-based iZettle for US$ 2.2 billion (EUR 1.87 billion), making it Paypal’s largest acquisition to date. Even the operation sequence is a surprise. iZettle has been in the mPOS market for a while, with a presence essentially in Western Europe, as well as Brazil and Mexico. The company achieved SEK 966 million (EUR 94 million) gross revenue in 2017 and anticipates its 2018 sales to reach SEK 1,440 million (EUR 140 million). On May 8, iZettle announced it was going for an IPO on Nasdaq Stockholm with an objective set at raising SEK 2 billion (EUR 195 million). Then Paypal came offer
We all know there is a first-mover advantage to companies which participate proactively in standardization. Most of the time, they are able to push into standards technologies they already master and market their latest products and developments once they are part of the standard. One may remember GSM, which became later known as 2G, was standardized by ETSI, the European Telecom Standards Institute. The development of GSM was essentially based on traditional landline expertise and on first developments made by European companies. When 3G was under consideration, the 3GPP was formed to standardize it. Worldwide organizations took part in the 3G project, although the project was still Europe
The US Department of Justice is has opened a probe into alleged coordination by AT&T, Verizon Communications and the GSMA, accused of having slowed down the adoption of eSIM standards. When adopted in consumer handsets, eSIMs would allow subscribers to switch between mobile network operators more easily than when they have to purchase a new physical SIM card. Verizon and AT&T together represent 70% of the wireless subscription market in the US. While the original eSIM concepts started as early as 2010, the technology has yet to be adopted on a large scale in consumer devices. Gemalto reports that Jean-Christophe Tisseuil from the GSMA recently stressed that M2M and consumer eSIM dynamics are
"There is no success without hardship." - Sophocles EMVCo, the body that represents the payment schemes, just announced that 54.6% of all cards issued globally by the end of 2017 were EMV-enabled. In addition, the number of EMV payment cards in circulation around the world increased by 1 billion over the previous 12 months, to a total of 7.1 billion. EMVCo obtained its data from its members Visa, Mastercard, American Express, JCB and China UnionPay. EMVCo also reports that 63.7% of all card-present transactions made around the world between January and December 2017 used EMV chip technology, increasing from 52.4% in 2016. However, these global figures need to be complemented by a more regio
