NFC Times Exclusive - AMSTERDAM, the Netherlands: ABN AMRO is the third and last of the Netherlands’ big three banks to launch its own mobile wallet, launching service today for its Maestro debit cardholders, the bank confirmed to NFC Times.
Launching NFC payments with host card emulation is not as easy as it sounds, however, Jos van de Kerkhof, the bank’s senior product manager for mobile payments, told the HCE and Tokenization Summit Friday. He added to NFC Times that poor communication between phones and terminals was the main reason that the initial failure rate during the pilot hit an astonishing one-third of attempts by consumers.
The commercial launch today follows a 5,000-user pilot the bank launched in September, which found significant interoperability problems between HCE-enabled Android phones and terminals, among other issues, which the bank had to correct.