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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC Times Exclusive – In line with its October promise, Samsung has launched its mobile payments service in two additional markets, Malaysia and Thailand, bringing the number of markets to 12, counting Puerto Rico. Still, in some of the markets where Samsung Pay has launched, the device maker adopted a different rollout strategy, which it calls “early access.”

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – One of Canada’s big five banks, CIBC, launched Samsung Pay this week, making its Visa-branded credit cards available as part of an “early-access” launch that Samsung itself hasn’t yet announced.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Apple has cracked the big five banks in Canada, with two of the country’s largest banks, including Royal Bank of Canada, today announcing they are participating in Apple Pay, with the three others to follow.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – The head of the Canadian telco joint venture Suretap Wallet told NFC Times that this week’s launch of the telco’s new wallet service was not prompted by the expected expansion of Apple Pay into Canada later this year.

Quebec-based credit union Desjardins says that it expects gradual, or what it calls “progressive,” adoption of the SIM-based NFC mobile payments service, which it launched commercially this week, following an earlier soft launch.

NFC Times Exclusive: With its high rate of smartphone ownership, strong contactless-payment infrastructure and well-developed NFC ecosystem, Canada is increasingly seen as a market to watch for NFC commercial deployments.

Canadian telco joint venture EnStream has signed a new three-year deal with BlackBerry, as it expands its TSM service into provisioning secure payment applications for Canadian banks.

Canada’s TD Canada Trust today announced the launch of its NFC-enabled TD Mobile Payment service, a Visa-branded credit application, which will be available on NFC SIM cards issued by all three of Canada’s major mobile operators.

Canadian debit network Interac, along with the Royal Bank of Canada, McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada and BlackBerry demonstrated what Interac billed as the first NFC-enabled debit transaction in Canada.

Research In Motion continues to promote its own trusted service management service–the only handset maker to offer one–announcing Wednesday approval by Visa of the service to manage secure elements on NFC phones.