France-based vendor Gemalto Thursday confirmed its growth projections for 2014 and its longer-term forecast for 2017, despite the recent announcements of support for host-card emulation by Visa and MasterCard.
Gemalto, the world’s largest smart card supplier and also the largest trusted service manager, has much to lose if pure host-card emulation, or HCE, takes off. It would enable banks and other service providers to avoid putting their applications on NFC SIMs, like the ones Gemalto supplies by the millions to mobile operators; or to require the hiring of a TSM to manage those applets over the air on the SIMs or other secure elements.
Gemalto CEO Olivier Piou, while he questioned the inherent security of HCE for EMV payments, sought to put a positive face on the growing interest in the technology, in comments to financial analysts Thursday, following release of the company’s fourth quarter and year-end results.
The key opportunity of HCE and token is about disrupting the way to provision and issue payment product. We should expect the experience of subscription, provisioning and issuance of a payment product to be the same as downloading a mobile apps from an appstore, without the need of multiple messaging between the host and the SE.