NFC TimesThe premier source for news, analysis and commentary on
Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – CaixaBank, Spain’s large savings bank and one of the most important early adopters globally among financial institutions of SIM-based NFC payments, has introduced a mobile-payments app based on host card emulation.

NFC Times Exclusive – Besides touting its much larger base of acceptance points, Samsung Electronics appears to be emphasizing what it says is a more “agnostic” approach to its technology for its forthcoming Samsung Pay platform, as compared with rival Apple Pay.  

NFC Times Exclusive – Taiwan’s TSM banking joint venture has received proposals from at least four vendors to supply a wallet platform with host-card emulation, as well as tokenization technology, as the group seeks to expand its thus far little-used TSM platform to offer its member banks the ability to launch cloud-based NFC payments by the end of 2015, NFC Times has learned.

UPDATED: NFC Times Exclusive – Australian credit union CUA has seen a 16% increase in value of transactions for mobile payments since the launch of its host-card emulation mobile-payments app last summer, though user numbers have remained small 11 months after one of the first HCE commercial launches globally.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Taiwan’s banking joint venture, Taiwan Mobile Payment Co., has disclosed that it will issue a request for tenders for a host-card emulation and tokenization platform, with plans calling for the technology to be made available to Taiwanese banks for mobile-payments launches by the end of the year.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight –Chinese banking giant Industrial and Commercial Bank of China has launched a mobile-payments service using host-card emulation, supporting credit cards branded by China UnionPay and Visa. 

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Gemalto CEO Olivier Piou said revenue from the vendor’s trusted service management business fell in the first quarter and would stay down for the rest of the year, while indicating Gemalto is no longer seeing many TSM tenders from telcos.

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 – New Zealand joint venture Semble has launched its SIM-based NFC mobile wallet, after delays and the decision by of two of the country’s big four banks to launch mobile payments from their own apps using host-card emulation.

NFC Times Exclusive – Is the TSM, as we know it, dying? Predictably, the three major global trusted service managers say no.