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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – With Switzerland’s No. 2 bank, Credit Suisse, expected to participate in Apple Pay, the U.S.-based tech giant continues to chip away at resistance among major European banks to joining its digital payments service.

MELBOURNE, SYDNEY, Australia – NFC Times Exclusive: On the face of it, Australia would seem like an ideal market for Apple to expand its Apple Pay service outside of the U.S. After all, iPhone market share here now hovers around 40%, usage rates of contactless payment at retail are the highest in the world and major banks are eager to roll out mobile payment.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Australia’s AMP Bank said it chose to launch mobile-payments with host-card emulation over other NFC technologies because of the “wider reach” the technology offers, since it’s “available to all NFC-enabled Android mobile phones running KitKat or later,” the bank’s director digital, Michael Weeding, told NFC Times.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Germany-based Giesecke & Devrient confirmed it is providing the host-card emulation technology for Commonwealth Bank’s commercial HCE launch this month of Tap & Pay from the bank’s Android-based mobile-banking app.

NFC Times Exclusive: Assuming Apple doesn’t put embedded secure elements in its next iPhone as some are predicting, the future for the embedded chip technology for NFC phones is uncertain–beset by stalled projects, growing interest in host-card emulation and questionable continued support from Samsung.

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.

MasterCard Worldwide announced its anticipated agreement with Samsung Electronics to enable PayPass applications on embedded chips in Samsung NFC devices and, as expected, named Commonwealth Bank of Australia as the first bank to launch under the deal.

NFC Times Exclusive: MasterCard Worldwide has moved forward with its deal with Samsung Electronics to enable its PayPass application on embedded chips in Samsung NFC phones, NFC Times has learned.

NFC Times Exclusive: Australia’s Commonwealth Bank has disclosed plans to put a MasterCard PayPass application onto an embedded secure element in selected Android NFC phones, the first major bank to disclose plans for launching commercial NFC payments on embedded chips since Google Wallet.

ANZ bank plans to launch a second trial of contactless-mobile payment, a small employee pilot that will put the bank’s payment application onto SIM cards for use with NFC-enabled Samsung Galaxy S III Android phones.