If you were hoping for a streamlined cashless payment roadmap for Japan, forget it. Things are just going to get more complex as various reward point ecosystems (Rakuten point, d-Point, Ponta point, etc.) slug it out for dominance across smartphone apps (QR Codes) and digital wallet platforms (NFC). Mercari joined […]
Apple - Apple Pay Suica - EMV - Mobile Payments - NFC-Felica - QR Code Payments
Joe Odagiri AirPAY Ads
OK, things are heating up in the Japanese cashless payments market ahead of the 10% consumption tax hike with cashless incentives. And things are getting fun. What other country in the world runs TV ads for cashless payment terminals? Recruit’s AirPay POS system for small stores deftly navigates the entire […]
Apple - Apple Pay + Wallet - Apple Pay Suica - EMV - Mobile Payments - NFC-Felica - QR Code Payments
Japan Cashless Map for 2019
Because of its long history pioneering many of the technologies used for contactless payments, Japan is one of the most interesting, complex and difficult markets to study and analyze cashless payment trends. Accurate analysis of Japanese cashless/contactless payment trends is challenging because of fragmentation and regionality. Every market report or […]
Apple Pay + Wallet - Apple Pay Suica - Apple Pay Transit - NFC-Felica - Suica
Japan’s economic revival, the cash tax and the contactless payments boom
Anybody who has lived in Japan any length of time knows the economic reality here is rarely reported accurately in the western media. The worn out narratives of the ‘lost decade’ (or is it two?), the ‘aging society’, the ‘Japan is so over’ are just too easy for the challenged journalists […]