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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Visa plans to buy the payments and ticketing unit of U.S.-based chip company Rambus for $75 million, as the payments network seeks to expand tokenization beyond Visa cards, including to bank accounts used for real-time payments, as well as to transactions processed by domestic networks.

NFC Times Exclusive – More than two years after EMVCo released its tokenization guidelines, there are still few token service providers operating besides those of the major payments networks, and there are no specifications yet from top networks Visa and MasterCard to help vendors to tokenize cards supporting their brands.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Silicon Valley-based chip technology licensing company Rambus is seeking to expand its customer base beyond chip suppliers to banks and other service providers with its purchase of mobile payments vendor Bell ID and a smaller sister company.

NFC Times Exclusive – NFC Times has learned new details about how Samsung intends to make money from its planned payments service, Samsung Pay; as well as the technology architecture the OEM will use and the identity of two unannounced banks, along with a new category of issuer that is planning to participate.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – U.S.-based Mozido, a supplier of cloud-based, white-label mobile payments and commerce products, upped its stake in NFC technology, making a $2.5 million investment in host-card emulation start-up SimplyTapp.

NFC Times Exclusive: Despite the interest in host-card emulation in North America and Europe grabbing the spotlight, there is a good chance that banks and other issuers in Asia-Pacific could generally commercialize the technology first, sources told NFC Times.

A second of Australia’s big four banks, Westpac Banking Corp., said it will finally be ready to launch its long-planned NFC contactless payments service with Visa using embedded chips in Samsung phones by the end of April, the bank told NFC Times.

NFC Times Special Report, Part Two: 
Interest continues to run high in host-card emulation since Google announced it would support the technology in its new version of Android, but with few if any public pilots of open-loop payment and no waivers or certifications yet granted by the major payment schemes, the technology has some maturing to do.

NFC Times Special Report, Part One: In a move with potentially far-reaching implications for the NFC industry, Google has built support for host-card emulation into its new Android operating system, which could enable payments and other “secure” applications without a secure element.