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Visa Inc. has released a few more details of its planned tokenization service, which it announced last week as part of its Visa Digital Solutions “suite of offerings.”

French mobile operators, banks and vendors say they are finally ready for a nationwide launch of NFC payments this year, a move that follows years of preparations. 

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.

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.

Transactions with Visa payWave cards in Taiwan grew by 19% during the third quarter with spending up by 23%, according to Visa’s country office in Taiwan.

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.

Retail locations accepting MasterCard PayPass contactless payment doubled in Europe in 2012, according to MasterCard Worldwide, a development that helps clear a path for more rollouts of NFC payment.

Samsung Electronics has introduced its much-anticipated Galaxy S III, which, as expected, will support NFC for mobile payment, along with an enhanced version of Google’s Android Beam peer-to-peer pairing-and-sharing feature.

Raiffeisen Bank International is putting a Visa debit application onto microSD cards that