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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

Visa reported this week that contactless payments continued to climb as a percentage of all face-to-face transactions with its brand, mainly at retail, and among the uses the network is continuing to push for contactless is to pay for transit fares.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Visa is supporting another provisioning company, Sweden-based Fidesmo, to deliver and manage Visa-generated tokens to passive wearables, such as analog designer watches, keyrings and bracelets. The move, which follows Visa’s support in recent months for at least one other provisioning company serving an analog watchmaker, promises to expand use of payments wearables to more issuers, markets and devices.  

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Both Visa and Mastercard say contactless transactions made up a growing share of all face-to-face transactions for cards and other credentials bearing their brands during the last fiscal quarter, crediting in part an increasing aversion to cash by consumers because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Contactless usage rates, however, had been increasing by nearly the same rates before the pandemic.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight -  Visa is rolling out what it calls “Tap to Phone” technology to 15 global markets, as it seeks to enable millions of small and micro-merchants that now mainly take cash to also accept contactless EMV credit and debit cards and credentials on NFC devices.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – While Visa’s country office in Taiwan was touting the fact that Taiwan ranks as one of the top countries in Asia Pacific for acceptance and use of contactless payments only six months ago, that hasn’t stopped the big payments network from actively promoting QR code payments on the island nation, too.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Visa plans to buy the payments and ticketing unit of U.S.-based chip company Rambus for $75 million, as the payments network seeks to expand tokenization beyond Visa cards, including to bank accounts used for real-time payments, as well as to transactions processed by domestic networks.

NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Visa says it plans to support QR code-based mobile payments late next year in Taiwan–a market where all three major “Pays” wallets have launched supporting Visa-branded cards with NFC.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – Some of the largest banks in the U.S. have been pressing Visa to allow them to tokenize their Visa-branded cards for mobile payments through a token service provider set up by their trade group, The Clearing House, which is owned by such major U.S. issuers as JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Capital One and Bank of America, NFC Times has learned.

NFC TIMES Exclusive – Unlike at least some other major networks, including Mastercard, Visa has shown no intention of allowing third-party token service providers to tokenize Visa-branded cards, requiring nearly all issuers to use Visa’s own Visa Token Service, or VTS, sources told NFC Times.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Visa says its move to phase out bank-issued alternate PANs and promote tokenization as specified by EMVCo–including its own Visa Token Service–is an effort to capitalize on the proliferation of Internet of Things devices that could be used for payments.