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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Major Dutch bank ABN Amro will discontinue its NFC-enabled mobile wallet in January, a little more than three years after launching the app in late 2016, with the bank acknowledging that few customers use the service.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – Some of the largest banks in the U.S. have been pressing Visa to allow them to tokenize their Visa-branded cards for mobile payments through a token service provider set up by their trade group, The Clearing House, which is owned by such major U.S. issuers as JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Capital One and Bank of America, NFC Times has learned.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – As NFC Times reported a month ago, U.S.-based Citigroup is the latest bank with plans to launch an HCE-enabled mobile wallet for Android phones, “Citi Pay,” which will launch in Asia-Pacific first then in the U.S., using Masterpass technology.

NFC Times Exclusive – U.S.-based Citigroup plans to soon launch its own NFC-based mobile payments service, Citi Pay, in the U.S. and Asia, in part using technology from Mastercard, NFC Times has learned.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight –  Wells Fargo’s announcement this week that it plans to launch mobile payments from its own app this summer using host card emulation technology would make it the second major U.S. issuer to offer HCE-enabled service from its own Android app, following Capital One, though Wells Fargo plans to make the payments service part of its mobile-banking app.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Capital One has become the first U.S. issuer to introduce NFC mobile payments using host card emulation with its own app and is one of the largest card issuers globally to launch with the technology.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Following a lull in attention on host-card emulation with the announcement and launch of Apple Pay in the latter half of last year, the buzz appears to be back on HCE, and among the latest organizations promoting it is MasterCard Worldwide.

Apple’s new tablets, the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3, unveiled today, will support the Touch ID fingerprint sensor to enable users to make purchases in apps with Apple Pay, but not in stores with NFC.

NFC Times Exclusive: Apple’s scheduled announcement Tuesday of its next iPhone is expected to make it the last and also the most prominent of the major smartphone makers to adopt NFC.

NFC Times Exclusive: Westpac New Zealand’s product chief told NFC Times he believes host-card emulation will reduce costs and increase flexibility, while ensuring the bank can use its own branded wallet.