NFC Times Exclusive Insight – While Poland has among the highest concentrations of contactless point-of-sale terminals globally, NFC mobile payments has not yet taken off.
UniCredit Group-owned Bank Pekao, one of Poland’s largest and oldest banks, hopes to change that and part of its strategy is to make its NFC service available on more handsets, but not tied to SIM cards. To address possible demand for mobile payments from a growing base of Windows smartphone users, Bank Pekao has launched what is believed to be the world's first app supporting host card emulation on Windows 10 smartphones, as confirmed to NFC Times by Microsoft.
The bank launched its PeoPay mobile payments application for smartphones running Windows 10 in February, extending the bank's mobile payments service to the Windows platform more than a year after first launching an HCE service on Android smartphones.