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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Barclaycard, one of the top payment card issuers in the UK, plans to launch NFC payments from its mobile-banking app in November using host card emulation, which will allow the issuer to avoid putting its payment applications on secure elements to roll out mobile payments.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – MasterCard Worldwide Tuesday announced its hub-like commercial tokenization program, Digital Enablement Express, a widely expected move that matches a similar service that rival Visa introduced in late May, Visa Digital Enablement Program, or VDEP. Like VDEP, MasterCard’s new tokenization program has signed up Google and Samsung for their respective payments services, though neither MasterCard nor Visa has announced that Apple would join.

NFC Times Exclusive – Commercial standards organization EMVCo says it will publish what are considered overdue updates to its tokenization specification before the end of the year, though the organization is releasing few specific details overall, and it’s unclear whether there will be a major update to the specification this year, NFC Times has learned.

NFC Times Exclusive – Turkish banking group BKM and at least some Turkish banks are among those planning to support their own form of tokenization–alternate PANs–for early and perhaps later rollouts of NFC mobile payments–a move that could put a crimp in the tokenization plans of the major payments schemes, Visa and MasterCard Worldwide.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Samsung Electronics today released exact dates for when it plans to launch its mobile-payments service, Samsung Pay–Aug. 20 in South Korea and the U.S. on Sept. 28–while saying it also intends to roll out the service in the UK, Spain and China.

NFC Times Exclusive – Taiwan’s TSM banking joint venture has received proposals from at least four vendors to supply a wallet platform with host-card emulation, as well as tokenization technology, as the group seeks to expand its thus far little-used TSM platform to offer its member banks the ability to launch cloud-based NFC payments by the end of 2015, NFC Times has learned.

NFC Times Exclusive – Mobile operators are considering shopping for technology to launch a common platform to request tokenized payment cards from such providers as MasterCard Worldwide and Visa and to load the tokens onto their NFC SIM cards, NFC Times has learned.

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 Insight – Taiwan’s banking joint venture, Taiwan Mobile Payment Co., has disclosed that it will issue a request for tenders for a host-card emulation and tokenization platform, with plans calling for the technology to be made available to Taiwanese banks for mobile-payments launches by the end of the year.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Apple today announced major new updates to Apple Pay, including the addition of store credit, debit and loyalty cards in the U.S., expansion of the mobile-payments service to its first overseas market, the UK, and a renaming of the wallet app itself from Passbook to Wallet.