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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Dutch bank ABN Amro plans to put its Mastercard-branded debit cards onto passive wearable devices, such as rings, bracelets and an analog watch from a major watchmaker, after the devices are in the hands of consumers.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Deutsche Telekom, one of the most important backers of SIM-based NFC through the years, now questions whether the technology could ever become a standard, as it quietly withdrew its little-used SIM-based NFC mobile wallet from the German market last week after more than two years.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight –  Singapore’s three major mobile operators are giving SIM-based NFC services another try, hoping that the offer of mobile transit fare collection will encourage more consumers to use their NFC phones to tap to pay, following the flop of the country’s NFC retail payments rollout that began in 2012.

NFC Times Exclusive – Vodafone Group’s proxy-card NFC mobile-payments offer, which is designed to enable subscribers to add their credit and debit cards to their Vodafone Wallets as funding accounts linked to a Vodafone prepaid card stored on the SIM, has yet to be launched by any major Vodafone branch operator in Europe.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – The head of the Canadian telco joint venture Suretap Wallet told NFC Times that this week’s launch of the telco’s new wallet service was not prompted by the expected expansion of Apple Pay into Canada later this year.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Orange in Spain is the latest telco to announce the launch of a co-branded mobile-payments service using SIM cards and NFC phones, one of about 15 or so operators to launch globally so far. But it remains to be seen how many more will follow suit.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Vodafone Group is relaunching its NFC-based Vodafone Wallet with tokenized payment applications, as it seeks to attract more users and issuers to the mobile wallet.

NFC Times Exclusive Analysis – Google purchased Softcard for one reason, really, to get its Google Wallet app preinstalled on Android phones sold by the Softcard mobile carriers.