NFC Times Exclusive: Visa seems to be developing a habit of taking a dig at mobile operators right before their showcase event, the Mobile World Congress, which starts next week in Barcelona.

Last year, it was the announcement that Visa had struck a deal with smartphone giant Samsung Electronics to preload its Visa payWave application on embedded chips in Samsung NFC devices. The deal would enable banks to bypass mobile operators and their NFC SIMs. 

This year, Visa has declared strong support for host-card emulation, a technology that enables banks and other issuers to avoid using any secure element at all in the device. The world No. 1 payments network said it already had initial HCE specifications ready for issuers and their vendors. 

MasterCard Worldwide, probably getting wind of the planned Visa announcement today, issued one of its own, declaring that its HCE specs would be ready by mid-2014. 

All this comes again at an awkward time for mobile operators, which are heavily invested in SIM-based NFC technology, which they will be highlighting again next week in Barcelona. 

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Among Topics Covered: 

• Visa’s unfortunate timing for telcos in announcing HCE support
• Putting the announcements of HCE specs by Visa and MasterCard Worldwide into perspective
• Examples of banks that still support secure elements
• Estimate of SIM rental fees in Canada
• Security issues for HCE
• Planned actions by telco trade group GSMA to cut costs and complexity of provisioning applets on NFC SIMs
• Results of Visa’s first snub of mobile operators, last year 

Among companies and organizations mentioned:

Visa
MasterCard Worldwide
Royal Bank of Canada, RBC,
OTP Bank
CIBC
GSMA 

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