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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – CaixaBank, Spain’s large savings bank and one of the most important early adopters globally among financial institutions of SIM-based NFC payments, has introduced a mobile-payments app based on host card emulation.

NFC Times Exclusive – Commercial standards organization EMVCo says it will publish what are considered overdue updates to its tokenization specification before the end of the year, though the organization is releasing few specific details overall, and it’s unclear whether there will be a major update to the specification this year, NFC Times has learned.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – U.S.-based Identiv revised its full-year revenue guidance downward during its second quarter earnings call on Thursday, but the compa

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Samsung Electronics today released exact dates for when it plans to launch its mobile-payments service, Samsung Pay–Aug. 20 in South Korea and the U.S. on Sept. 28–while saying it also intends to roll out the service in the UK, Spain and China.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – The new CEO of Israel-based On Track Innovations, Shlomi Cohen, is starting his tenure with the announcement by the company of declining revenue and continuing losses for the second quarter of 2015.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – NXP Semiconductors reported its NFC-based mobile transactions business fell in the second quarter compared with the first quarter, with CEO Rick Clemmer apparently blaming the delayed launch of Apple Pay in China, which he indicated is hurting its sales of NFC chips to Android handset makers in the country. 

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Hong Kong Telecom is the latest telco to introduce its own prepaid mobile payments service and wallet app, which supports MasterCard PayPass for in-store purchases, along with online payments and a peer-to-peer funds transfer service–the latter initiated by NFC P2P mode.

NFC Times Exclusive – Deutsche Telekom has appointed a new head of payments and plans to support host-card emulation among other technologies as it seeks to revamp its struggling NFC mobile wallet, NFC Times has learned.

NFC Times Exclusive – Mobile operators are considering shopping for technology to launch a common platform to request tokenized payment cards from such providers as MasterCard Worldwide and Visa and to load the tokens onto their NFC SIM cards, NFC Times has learned.

NFC Times Exclusive – Vodafone Group’s proxy-card NFC mobile-payments offer, which is designed to enable subscribers to add their credit and debit cards to their Vodafone Wallets as funding accounts linked to a Vodafone prepaid card stored on the SIM, has yet to be launched by any major Vodafone branch operator in Europe.

NFC Times Exclusive – Major point-of sale-terminal vendors say that their most recently deployed terminals and perhaps others will be ready to accept loyalty cards from Apple’s Wallet when the nonpayment application launches with iOS 9 this fall.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Suppliers of cashless payment for vending machines predict the rollout of Apple Pay, along with planned introduction of Android Pay, will continue to reduce the use of cash at U.S. vending machines and will also lead to higher transaction amounts, though did not release actual figures.