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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC Times Exclusive – As mainstream trusted service managers struggle to cope with a world in which their services are in much less demand, a tiny, self-funded start-up is seeking to carve out a niche as TSM for millions of fitness wristbands, festival bracelets and other lower-end wearables that might one day be enabled for payment.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Visa maintains that its offer to waive tokenization fees for the long term is designed to simplify the connections between thousands of card issuers and such wallet providers as Google and, perhaps later, Apple, thus driving widespread rollouts of mobile-payments services.

NFC Times Exclusive – With the role of the TSM coming under increasing pressure for being too complex and costly, Gemalto, the world’s largest TSM, is seeking to reposition its TSM offer–promoting it as being part of a large “trusted services hub,” as the France-based vendor tries to convince more banks to provision their credit and debit cards on NFC SIMs.

NFC Times Exclusive–People on the Move:
France-based vendor Gemalto has completed internal changes to its corporate structure, creating a separate unit for platforms and services and one for smart card products and appointing executive Philippe Vallée as chief operating officer.

NFC Times Special Report, Part One: In a move with potentially far-reaching implications for the NFC industry, Google has built support for host-card emulation into its new Android operating system, which could enable payments and other “secure” applications without a secure element.

Far EasTone, one of Taiwan’s top three mobile operators, Monday announced plans for a large multiapplication NFC pilot among employees of its large conglomerate owner, Far Eastern Group.

Globe Telecom of the Philippines is planning to expand its GCash funds-transfer and bill-payment service to the physical point of sale, and has launched a project that puts a closed-loop GCash payment application onto microSD cards.

T-Mobile in Poland, as expected, today unveiled its planned NFC commercial service, planning to launch before the end of the month with a credit application issued by Polbank EFG that supports MasterCard PayPass.

France-based Morpho is advancing a proposal through its newly acquired TSM unit, Cassis International, that would attempt to set up a global NFC service roaming network.

Smart card and ID security company Morpho has signed an agreement to acquire Singapore-based trusted service manager Cassis International, putting another major TSM platform into the hands of a smart card supplier, NFC Times has learned.