NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Despite other large banks outside of the U.S. using their own tokenization for early commercial launches of mobile payments with host card emulation, Singapore’s United Overseas Bank told NFC Times it decided to go with tokenization from Visa and soon from MasterCard for its new HCE-based service.
The choice of tokenization from Visa makes UOB the first bank to use the Visa Token Service for a bank-issued wallet app outside of the U.S., noted Aaron Chiew, head of mobile, payments and digital sales, UOB.
Although UOB launched its HCE-enabled mobile-banking app, UOB Mighty, last week to some unfavorable reviews, most of the complaints were not directly related to the payments feature, and the bank contended that most of the bugs and other problems are due to users rooting their Android devices or jailbreaking their iOS devices. But the payment service, which is available only on Android phones, does not yet work on Sony NFC devices and at least a couple of Nexus devices, even though all or most of these devices support HCE technology.
