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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Contactless payments in Europe, almost exclusively from cards, increased by more than 170% in the fourth quarter of 2014, MasterCard Europe has announced, and the payment network cited NFC payments projects in Europe as a positive sign, while promoting the prospect for host-card emulation-based launches.

Apple has hired Visa Europe’s director of mobile, Mary Carol Harris, as the tech giant gears up for its expected launch of Apple Pay in Europe later next year.

NFC Times Exclusive: France’s largest mobile operator, Orange, has concluded a deal with Visa to support its launch of Orange Cash in France, the latest mobile operator to announce plans to roll out its own branded prepaid payment service on NFC phones.

Visa Europe continues to promote its contactless progress, especially the UK market–noting that spending with its Visa payWave application increased five-fold in June.

The UK continues to expand its rollout of contactless, with Starbucks completing its deployment of contactless point-of-sale terminals at 550 coffee shops nationwide.

Consumers in Europe did 19 million transactions with Visa-branded contactless bank cards in March, up by nearly 50% from December, announced Visa Europe Tuesday, which predicts monthly transactions will increase to 52 million by the end of 2013.

Spain’s CaixaBank, mobile operator Telefónica and Visa Europe, along with technology vendor Gemalto, plan to demonstrate NFC payment at next week’s big Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Visa is reportedly gearing up to support a “mainstream launch” of NFC mobile payments, along with a cloud-based digital wallet, according to Marc O’Brien, managing director of Visa UK and Ireland.

Visa Europe predicts the UK will have 34 million contactless Visa-branded cards on issue and 175,000 contactless terminals deployed by the end of 2013, with Europe reaching 70 million Visa-branded contactless cards and 650,000 contactless terminals this year.

Visa Europe predicted that by the end of 2013, there would be 40 issuers with live NFC or contactless-mobile payment services across Europe and 80 smartphones certified by Visa to handle the payments.