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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC Times Exclusive – 2015 will mark the first full year of Apple Pay and expansion of the payment service internationally, along with the coming of payment wearables led by Apple Watch, and the much needed maturing for host-card emulation and associated tokenization.

NFC Times Exclusive – Payments standards group EMVCo said it doesn’t expect problems with the NFC booster technology used by Apple in its new iPhones, although the group acknowledged that the technology is “very new and has not yet been fully studied and standardized.”

NFC Times Exclusive: The head of mobile payments for France-based mobile operator Orange Group said he wants to talk to Apple about enabling the telco’s co-branded payment application, Orange Cash, on the Apple Pay platform. 

NFC Times Exclusive: While some high-volume U.S. merchants, such as McDonald’s, Subway and Walgreens accept Apple Pay, along with other NFC-payments services, a key weakness of these platforms is the low percentage of merchants in the U.S. where consumers can tap to pay with their phones.  

NFC Times Exclusive: While the thought of more consumers tapping their phones to pay in stores is attracting the most attention with the launch of Apple Pay, it’s the prospect of users paying for purchases in mobile apps with Apple Pay that could be the real breakthrough, say representatives of Visa and MasterCard Worldwide. 

Although Dekkers Davidson, CEO of the big MCX mobile-commerce consortium in the U.S., said the group is working on Bluetooth low energy and NFC, the main technology MCX is expected to launch with next year will still be QR codes.

The MCX Merchant group has confirmed what most insiders already knew: That it has an exclusivity clause for members to only accept mobile payments from its own payments platform.

NFC Times Exclusive: Small financial institutions want their members to be able to use Apple Pay, but would prefer to keep transactions in their own branded mobile applications instead, sources at participating credit unions have told NFC Times.

NXP Semiconductors reported a big jump in sales from its emerging ID unit in the third quarter, thanks to shipments of NFC chips and secure elements to Apple for the tech giant’s new iPhones.

NFC Times Exclusive: While NXP Semiconductors won the coveted contract to supply NFC chips and secure elements to Apple for its new iPhone models, it has been cut out of the recent business for Samsung Galaxy handsets, including the Note 4.