Spain's Banco Sabadell is using a host card emulation (HCE) solution provided by Carta Worldwide for the NFC payments technology trial it is conducting in partnership with MasterCard.

"The most notable feature of this pilot is how easy it is for users to add their credit cards to their phone without having to manipulate any physical secure element or rely on third party service providers," says Albert Figueras, Banco Sabadell's director of credit cards and consumer finance.

Carta announced it had added support for HCE to its NFC offering at MWC 14 last week. The platform will be used in the trial to "provide full lifecycle support for cardholder credentials and transactions. It will use devices with Android OS KitKat 4.4 and will support NFC-based high value transactions (HVT) with mobile PIN."

"HCE technology will accelerate the deployment of NFC-based mobile products at a fraction of the cost of traditional models that are currently in market," says Carta CEO Brian Semkiw. "I'm very excited about the potential for this technology breakthrough to accelerate deployment of NFC mobile payment services."