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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – By switching from NFC SIM-based to host card emulation mobile payments service at the end of November, one of Canada's top five banks, Scotiabank, is hoping to “build adoption” at a “higher magnitude” for its My Mobile Wallet service, a bank spokeswoman told NFC Times.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – One of Canada’s big five banks, CIBC, launched Samsung Pay this week, making its Visa-branded credit cards available as part of an “early-access” launch that Samsung itself hasn’t yet announced.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Apple has cracked the big five banks in Canada, with two of the country’s largest banks, including Royal Bank of Canada, today announcing they are participating in Apple Pay, with the three others to follow.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – It looked like a promising compromise at the time, when Royal Bank of Canada launched RBC Secure Cloud in January of 2014–a hybrid approach to NFC payments that combined cloud with SIMs, storing a small applet on SIM cards.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Apple’s announcement of its expansion of Apple Pay to five more markets, including Australia and Canada this year, with only one major issuer– American Express–underscores the problems the tech giant is having in signing up banks for the overseas expansion of its mobile-payments service.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – With the first Apple Watch units set to be delivered this week, NFC payments for wearable devices becomes a budding market, though it remains to be seen whether consumers want to tap their watches or wristbands to pay.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight –Apple is getting some pushback from banks as it seeks to expand its payments service, Apple Pay, outside of the U.S., where its U.S. business model along with other characteristics of the U.S. market will not translate well, NFC Times has learned.

NFC Times Exclusive – The Royal Bank of Canada plans a commercial launch of host-card emulation in 2015 following a small employee pilot of HCE payments, but declined to specify a date, head of payments innovation Jeremy Bornstein told NFC times in an interview.

Quebec-based credit union Desjardins says that it expects gradual, or what it calls “progressive,” adoption of the SIM-based NFC mobile payments service, which it launched commercially this week, following an earlier soft launch.

NFC Times Exclusive: With its high rate of smartphone ownership, strong contactless-payment infrastructure and well-developed NFC ecosystem, Canada is increasingly seen as a market to watch for NFC commercial deployments.