NFC TimesThe premier source for news, analysis and commentary on
Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC Times Exclusive – The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority has issued a request for proposal with plans to launch an NFC pilot this year followed later by a rollout, putting the authority’s Mifare-based fare-collection application mainly on Android NFC phones.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Dutch bank Rabobank has launched an NFC-enabled mobile wallet, storing a debit application on embedded secure elements in two older Samsung Android devices, which the bank claims is the first NFC mobile payments launch in the country.

Sales in NXP Semiconductor’s emerging ID business, which mainly includes its NFC chips, soared in the fourth quarter, growing by more than 200%, compared with the same period a year earlier, thanks mainly to the roll out of Apple Pay.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Broadcom made only passing reference to NFC during a conference call Thursday to discuss the company’s fourth quarter and full-year earnings, although CEO Scott McGregor listed NFC as one of the technologies expected to help lead to growth in the company’s high-end connectivity business.

NFC Times Exclusive – An announcement Tuesday by USA Technologies of a “nationwide rollout of (200,000) new acceptance points for Apple Pay” was merely a show of support for Apple's new payments platform, not a new deployment or upgrade to existing equipment, NFC Times has learned, and the vendor’s unattended point-of-sale terminals will continue to accept other forms of NFC and contactless payments.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Germany-based white-label payments software and prepaid payments services provider Wirecard is not taking sides in the debate between SIM-based mobile payments and HCE, despite its recent launch of the first wearable device to support HCE, executive vice president Joern Leogrande told NFC Times.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Turkish payment card organization and network BKM has chosen HCE payments over the SIM-based service it had launched previously, with a representative telling NFC Times that the banking group believes HCE will be simpler to deploy and more popular with consumers than SIM-based services, which have seen low consumer take-up in the country.

NFC Times Exclusive – 2015 will mark the first full year of Apple Pay and expansion of the payment service internationally, along with the coming of payment wearables led by Apple Watch, and the much needed maturing for host-card emulation and associated tokenization.

NFC Times Exclusive – The NFC Forum is working on a tag Type 5 specification based on the ISO/IEC 15693 standard, NFC Forum executive director Paula Hunter has confirmed to NFC Times. She did not release a timeframe for publishing of the new specification, however.

U.S.-based chip maker Broadcom announced it is sampling a new NFC chip targeting the automotive market.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight: TAIPEI, Taiwan – Taiwan’s banking joint venture, Taiwan Mobile Payment Co., as expected, announced the launch of its TSM service Tuesday, with at least 32 Taiwanese banks planning to make their Visa- and MasterCard-branded payment cards available to be downloaded and provisioned by the TSM.

NFC Times Exclusive – The Royal Bank of Canada plans a commercial launch of host-card emulation in 2015 following a small employee pilot of HCE payments, but declined to specify a date, head of payments innovation Jeremy Bornstein told NFC times in an interview.