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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – The recent announcement by large Spain-based banking group BBVA of plans to enable more banks across its footprint in Latin America to roll out the NFC-enabled BBVA Wallet as part of their banking apps could run into problems, given trends for low take-up of bank-issued NFC wallets. 

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Belgium’s domestic debit network Bancontact is offering both QR code and NFC-based mobile payments services with 20 banks in the country, as backers seek to expand use by consumers of mobile and contactless payments, which each make up only around 1% of total Bancontact transactions.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – Banks planning to launch host card emulation-based mobile payments have a decision to make: Should they incorporate the payments feature in their mobile-banking apps or introduce a separate wallet app.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – At least two German banks plan to follow the country's largest bank by assets, Deutsche Bank, in offering host card emulation-based mobile payments to their customers, NFC Times has learned.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – PayPal will use the Discover Financial Services acceptance infrastructure and tokenization for its move to in-store payments with Android Pay, NFC Times has confirmed.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – PayPal and Google announced a deal that promises to finally bring HCE payments to U.S. PayPal account holders, after delays–enabling users to pay with PayPal through Android Pay.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – As OEM Pay wallet providers try to get more transit operators to put their closed-loop ticketing applets onto the NFC embedded secure chips in their devices, there is growing interest in alternatives to enable mobile transit ticketing.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – With Apple showing no signs of backing off its policy of restricting use of its NFC technology to Apple Pay only, banks and payments services providers are looking for ways to enable their iPhone-packing customers to pay with their phones in stores, especially in countries where Apple Pay hasn’t yet launched.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – There are markets where the major banks welcome Apple Pay and other “Pays” wallets, such as Taiwan, the most recent country to launch Apple Pay. And then there are countries where banks hold back.

NFC Times Exclusive – Visa and PayPal on Tuesday announced an extension to Asia-Pacific of last year’s agreement to work together on digital payments in the U.S., including opening up Visa tokenization and Visa payWave-enabled terminals to PayPal users for in-store NFC transactions.