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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – While Chase Pay will offer merchants in the MCX consortium a potential consumer base of 94 million Chase payment card accounts and the promise of integration with their loyalty programs and offers, the essential element of the deal was the very low transaction fees Chase will charge.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – It looked like a promising compromise at the time, when Royal Bank of Canada launched RBC Secure Cloud in January of 2014–a hybrid approach to NFC payments that combined cloud with SIMs, storing a small applet on SIM cards.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Apple’s announcement of its expansion of Apple Pay to five more markets, including Australia and Canada this year, with only one major issuer– American Express–underscores the problems the tech giant is having in signing up banks for the overseas expansion of its mobile-payments service.

NFC Times Exclusive – MasterCard has released its first list of certified vendors for host card emulation products supporting its cloud-based payments specifications, though the list includes relatively few suppliers so far. Meanwhile, neither Visa nor MasterCard has apparently certified tokenization suppliers.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – The NFC Forum has introduced a specification for an NFC tag Type 5, supporting the ISO/IEC 15693 protocol, but the trade and standards group is not supporting the protocol’s longer range.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – The Georgia subsidiary of Russia-based VTB Bank has launched an NFC mobile-payments service using host card emulation, an implementation that featured a quick ramp-up, according to the HCE vendor on the project.

NFC Times Exclusive – Seven major Chinese banks have launched NFC mobile payments using host card emulation, or are planning to do so soon, as they and payment network China UnionPay try to roll out mobile payments more widely and guard their turf against such Internet players as Alipay and Tencent Holdings. 

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Inside Secure, an early NFC chip supplier, which has since focused on embedded security, has replaced its long-serving CEO Rémy de Tonnac with smart card industry veteran Amedeo D’Angelo, hoping to turn around chronic losses and a plunging share price.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – With contactless card payment growing more popular in Europe and high-profile NFC mobile-payments services such as Apple Pay starting to gain a foothold there, payment schemes are preparing to significantly raise or eliminate caps on transaction value to try to encourage even more growth in contactless and NFC payments.

NFC Times Exclusive – A joint venture of Taiwanese banks and banking groups has chosen U.S.-based Mozido to supply it with host card emulation, tokenization and wallet technology, a surprise win for Mozido, which bought the U.S. mobile commerce arm of South Korean IT services firm SK C&C less than a year ago, NFC Times has learned. 

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – U.S.-based unattended retail payments company USA Technologies had nearly 300,000 NFC-enabled cashless payment terminals connected to its network as of the end of the 2015 fiscal year and expects that to grow strongly next year, as mobile-payments services such as Android Pay roll out, the company said.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Google officially launched Android Pay in the U.S., its host card emulation-based rival to Apple Pay and its second stab at rolling out NFC payments for in-store payments, following its little-used Google Wallet.