Leaders and followers

Well, once again, Kazakhstan shows leadership in the secure retail transactions field with the launch of an HCE app for contactless mobile payments.

Customers of Kazkommertsbank (KKB) in Kazakhstan can now make host card emulation (HCE) based NFC mobile payments using a new service launched in partnership with Visa.

From Kazakhstan gets HCE payments • NFC World+

They have always been in the forefront of these developments. In fact, as I wrote a decade ago…

So here is a picture for Borat to take with him next time he visits America. It’s an EMV terminal.

From Cultural learnings of Kazakhstan for make benefit glorious nation of America.

The reason I bring this up here is more about the technology than the location. We’re very interested in the potential for HCE in the mass market, not only for payments but also for ticketing, loyalty and other applications. But I just wanted to remind everyone, again, that while the association with NFC is forefront in industry thinking, the very first HCE transaction that I saw with my own eyes deep in the skunkworks at CHYP End, many years ago, was nothing to do with NFC. And one of our fun skunkworks projects last year was running HCE over Bluetooth to complete EMV “card present” transactions.

Amsterdam HCE

Comments

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