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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Apple vowed it will not agree to open up its NFC technology or yield to other negotiating points that four large Australian banks have raised as part of their request to antitrust regulators to negotiate collectively with Apple and to boycott participation in Apple Pay while the negotiations are going on.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – One of Australia's largest supermarket chain, Coles, and the Australian Retailers Association have thrown their support behind four major banks seeking permission from Australian antitrust regulators to negotiate as a bloc with Apple as they try to break what they see as the tech giant's divide-and-conquer strategy for recruiting banks for Apple Pay.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Apple has responded to a request to regulators by four major Australian banks to jointly negotiate terms for their adoption of Apple Pay and to boycott participation during the negotiations with a strongly worded letter, branding the group’s proposed action worthy of a “cartel” that would “harm consumers, lead to less competition and less innovation and set a troubling precedent.”

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – In an unprecedented move, four major Australian banks, including three of the country’s big four financial institutions, have asked the

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – ANZ is the first bank in Australia to launch with Apple Pay, with Apple able to crack into the big four banks, which had been balking at signing up for the payments service mainly because of Apple’s demands for transaction fees.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Three of the big four banks in Australia have now launched HCE mobile payments commercially, but only one of them, National Australia Bank, is using tokenization from a payments scheme, Visa.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Another major Australian bank, ANZ, has launched mobile payments with host card emulation, meaning that three of the country’s big four banks have now launched mobile payments using HCE for their customers packing Android phones.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Google has announced it will expand Android Pay in the contactless payments hotspot of Australia during the first half of 2016 with at least two of the big four banks among other issuers planning to participate, while Apple had to make do with only one issuer, American Express, for its Apple Pay launch in the country.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Australia’s largest domestic debit network, eftpos, told NFC Times the network’s planned tokenization service would launch on time and contends the service would not struggle against Visa and MasterCard if those major networks launched their “free” tokenization services in Australia.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Apple’s announcement of its expansion of Apple Pay to five more markets, including Australia and Canada this year, with only one major issuer– American Express–underscores the problems the tech giant is having in signing up banks for the overseas expansion of its mobile-payments service.