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Australia’s largest credit union, CUA, is the first financial institution in Asia-Pacific to commercially launch mobile payments using host-card emulation, announcing the move today in Australia.

NFC Times Exclusive: Both Visa and MasterCard plan to offer their own HCE services to banks and other issuers to help the financial institutions launch host-card emulation, as the payment networks continue to try to expedite the rollout of HCE technology for NFC mobile payments, NFC Times has learned.

NFC Times Exclusive: Host-card emulation represents an “inflection point” for driving the rollout of NFC mobile payments and could also help the SIM-based NFC ecosystem to become more efficient and less costly, the head of payments innovation for major Spanish bank BBVA told NFC Times.

Spanish bank BBVA is claiming to be the first bank to commercially launch payments with host-card emulation, announcing today an upgrade of its Android mobile-wallet app incorporating Visa’s HCE specifications.

The next major Android upgrade, code-named Android L, includes changes to the way host-card emulation handles default applications for payment, according to a developer preview.

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.

France-based Gemalto, the largest supplier of NFC SIMs globally, says it is not scaling back its projections for shipments of the cards this year, despite delays in orders by European mobile operators and other factors, such as host-card emulation.

France-based Inside Secure has acquired encryption and software security company Metaforic in a cash deal worth at least $11.6 million, which Inside Secure says will help equip it to offer security services for host-card emulation-based mobile payments.

The move to standardize tokens by the major payment networks has broad implications for how mobile commerce, including NFC payments, will be rolled out.

The NFC Forum has issued a statement of support for host-card emulation at its all-member meeting this week in San Francisco, calling HCE a “promising addition to the portfolio of NFC solutions that could potentially accelerate market growth.”