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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – While Chase Pay will offer merchants in the MCX consortium a potential consumer base of 94 million Chase payment card accounts and the promise of integration with their loyalty programs and offers, the essential element of the deal was the very low transaction fees Chase will charge.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Google announced its much-anticipated response to Apple Pay, with an updated host-card-emulation-based payments platform, Android Pay, that will incorporate tokenization,  fingerprint biometrics and in-app payments, in addition to in-store tapping to pay. 

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.

The MCX merchant consortium, which is gearing up to launch a mobile-wallet platform and bar-code based mobile-payment services in the U.S. has named the former head of mobile commerce for Barclaycard US as CEO, following a long search.

The MCX consortium, the group of major U.S. merchants planning to roll out their own mobile wallet, will primarily use bar codes and cloud-based technologies to start off with, not NFC.

As Google readies the launch of the next version of its wallet, expected to feature the addition of a physical payment card, other mobile-commerce players, including Google Wallet partner Sprint, are gearing up with their own offers.

More than a dozen large U.S. merchants, including Wal-Mart Stores, Target, Best Buy and 7-Eleven, have formed a company to offer consumers mobile payments and customized offers, an initiative that would compete with Google Wallet, Isis and other mobile wallets.

The senior director of financial services for Best Buy, the largest consumer electronics chain in the United States, said she believes NFC holds great promise but fears costs will be daunting, standards are insufficient and the chain’s customer data might be used to benefit competitors.