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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight– October will mark the fifth anniversary of the launch of Apple Pay in the U.S., Apple’s first country for its groundbreaking NFC payments service. 

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Wells Fargo, the third largest U.S. bank by assets, made good on its pledge last March to launch NFC-enabled ATM cash withdrawals by the end of this year, although that is one year behind schedule, and Wells Fargo is far from the first major bank globally to support the technology on ATMs, even in the U.S.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Although Bank of America announced that its customers would “soon” be able to use the PayPal Wallet to pay for purchases in stores using NFC, a bank spokeswoman has told NFC Times that the NFC-enabled wallet might not even be available next year.

NFC Times Exclusive – Few industry sources agree on the size of the contactless-acceptance footprint in the U.S. that enables merchants to accept Apple Pay and other NFC-enabled wallets; but one thing most of them do agree on is that contactless acceptance is not sufficient to support any kind of significant adoption of the wallets.

BARCELONA, Spain – NFC Times Exclusive Insight: Samsung Electronics has unveiled its Apple Pay rival, which it calls Samsung Pay, a mobile-payments service that, as expected, supports technology from Samsung’s recent acquisition of LoopPay combined with NFC. 

Apple’s new tablets, the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3, unveiled today, will support the Touch ID fingerprint sensor to enable users to make purchases in apps with Apple Pay, but not in stores with NFC.

Apple is launching its mobile-payments platform, Apple Pay, Oct.