NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Chinese payment network China UnionPay has announced support for Huawei Pay, a deal that could substantially expand the number of banks and payments cards that Huawei could enable for its NFC payments service as it seeks to compete with Apple and Apple Pay.
Huawei is believed to have actually launched Huawei Pay without a lot of fanfare in December on its Mate S flagship device, with participation from at least one bank, China CITIC. Earlier this month, the OEM announced support by a second major bank, Bank of China. And Huawei also expanded support for the payments service to another high-end device, the Mate 8.
Both Android NFC devices, the Mate S and Mate 8, store the tokenized payment cards on embedded chips, which are supplied by NXP Semiconductors, NFC Times has learned.