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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC Times Exclusive – E.Sun Commercial Bank, a top five card issuer in Taiwan, plans to launch NFC payments from its own wallet app using host-card emulation, NFC Times has learned, the first major Taiwanese bank to make the move.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Despite other large banks outside of the U.S. using their own tokenization for early commercial launches of mobile payments with host card emulation, Singapore’s United Overseas Bank told NFC Times it decided to go with tokenization from Visa and soon from MasterCard for its new HCE-based service.

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 – MasterCard’s Poland-based payment transaction processor, Trevica, has licensed host card emulation technology from Turkey-based Cardtek in order to provide a managed HCE service to banks it serves in Europe.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – It looked like a promising compromise at the time, when Royal Bank of Canada launched RBC Secure Cloud in January of 2014–a hybrid approach to NFC payments that combined cloud with SIMs, storing a small applet on SIM cards.

NFC Times Exclusive – MasterCard has released its first list of certified vendors for host card emulation products supporting its cloud-based payments specifications, though the list includes relatively few suppliers so far. Meanwhile, neither Visa nor MasterCard has apparently certified tokenization suppliers.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Capital One has become the first U.S. issuer to introduce NFC mobile payments using host card emulation with its own app and is one of the largest card issuers globally to launch with the technology.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – The Georgia subsidiary of Russia-based VTB Bank has launched an NFC mobile-payments service using host card emulation, an implementation that featured a quick ramp-up, according to the HCE vendor on the project.

NFC Times Exclusive – Seven major Chinese banks have launched NFC mobile payments using host card emulation, or are planning to do so soon, as they and payment network China UnionPay try to roll out mobile payments more widely and guard their turf against such Internet players as Alipay and Tencent Holdings. 

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – At least one more of China’s big four banks, and perhaps two, have reportedly introduced mobile payments with host card emulation, following Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, which launched HCE-based service in May.