NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – In addition to the NFC secure elements that NXP Semiconductors is providing to wearables maker Garmin for its vívoactive 3 and forthcoming Forerunner 645 smartwatches supporting Garmin Pay, NXP is also supplying its “Loader Service,” a technology that the chip maker has been pushing for more than three years.
NFC Times Exclusive Insight – About 60% of Chinese consumers who have activated transit cards in their Xiaomi Mi Pay wallet phones in Shenzhen and Shanghai have topped up value on the cards at least twice–an indicator of use–Charles Dachs, NXP Semiconductors’ NFC chief, told NFC Times, noting that there are more rollouts of NFC transit ticketing to come in OEM Pay wallets in China.
NFC Times Exclusive Insight – If a planned acquisition by Qualcomm of NXP Semiconductors, as reported, were to go through, it would not affect supplies of NFC chips to smartphone makers using other processor chips, said an expert.
NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Despite providing the NFC technology for three “OEM Pays” that have launched in China or which are scheduled to do so, NXP Semiconductors CEO Richard Clemmer still says he sees transit fare collection as the main opportunity going forward for the chip maker’s NFC technology in China.
NFC Times Exclusive Insight – NXP Semiconductors will take another crack at rolling out its “loader service,” which seeks to make it easier for service providers to load payment and other applications on the chip maker’s embedded secure elements by managing keys on the chip.
NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Apple Pay is proving to be a tough act to follow for NXP Semiconductors, with the Netherlands-based chip maker projecting lower sales next quarter for the business unit that includes its NFC chips, as part of an overall revenue decline for the vendor, which NXP largely blames on the Chinese market.
Sales in NXP Semiconductor’s emerging ID business, which mainly includes its NFC chips, soared in the fourth quarter, growing by more than 200%, compared with the same period a year earlier, thanks mainly to the roll out of Apple Pay.
Netherlands-based chip maker NXP Semiconductors has filed a patent infringement suit against rival chip maker, U.S.-based Marvell Semiconductor, which claims that Marvell infringed on four of its U.S. patents in chips sold to Microsoft for its Xbox One gaming console.
With interest growing again in embedded secure elements in NFC phones to store applications, thanks to Apple Pay, NXP Semiconductors is trying to drive demand for its embedded chips in Android phones by making it easier for service providers to load their applications on the silicon.
NXP Semiconductors reported a big jump in sales from its emerging ID unit in the third quarter, thanks to shipments of NFC chips and secure elements to Apple for the tech giant’s new iPhones.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – The first contactless payments wearables resulting from UK-based Barclays partnerships with seven mostly analog watchmakers are beginning to roll out, with more planned–all using the bank’s bPay contactless chips and payments service.
NFC TIMES Exclusive – Google has signed up 640,000 small merchants in India to use its mobile payments service, Tez, a Google spokesman told NFC Times.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight –Vancouver is the latest major city to enable riders to tap to pay fares with contactless bank cards, including card credentials loaded into such NFC-enabled mobile payments services as Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Walmart Inc. has ended a trial of its Mobile Express Scan & Go app in its Walmart stores in the U.S., which had enabled shoppers to scan their items themselves and pay with a stored credit or debit card, then leave the store, after having a greeter scan a bar code in their apps to briefly check the receipt.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Another major Chinese city is accepting QR code-based payments for transit fare collection, with riders of the Shenzhen Metro now able to use WeChat Pay to cover the fares.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Germany’s largest bank, which announced plans Monday to pilot a new payments system for airlines that would enable travelers to buy tickets without pulling out their credit or debit cards, is also planning to expand the scheme to other industries, a bank spokesman told NFC Times.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Apple said the number of Apple Pay users doubled globally while transactions tripled during the last quarter, but the company did not release many details explaining reasons for the increases and again released no actual figures on Apple Pay usage.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Transport for London this week was again trumpeting its move to open-loop fare collection with contactless credit and debit cards and applications on NFC phones–noting that contactless payments now accounts for half of all pay-as-you-go metro and rail rides in and around the UK’s capital.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight –Major card networks Visa and Mastercard hope a new technical framework for online transactions they are backing from their jointly owned EMVCo specifications group will help them keep more transactions on their networks, amid growing competition for mobile and other digital payments and lackluster take-up of the networks’ respective online digital wallets, Visa Checkout and Masterpass.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Struggling wearables maker Fitbit on Monday began selling its second smartwatch, the Fitbit Versa, supporting its NFC-enabled Fitbit Pay service, but not all versions of the new device support NFC in the U.S.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Both Ant Financial and Tencent Holdings have used their hundreds of millions of users, ready access to Chinese bank accounts, billions of yuan in subsidies for merchants and consumers and protected market status in China against Western competitors to build a combined mobile payments business valued in the trillions of U.S. dollars in transactions.
