NFC Times Exclusive – Deutsche Telekom has appointed a new head of payments and plans to support host-card emulation among other technologies as it seeks to revamp its struggling NFC mobile wallet, NFC Times has learned.

Peter Vesco, brought in four years ago to head payments for Germany-based Deutsche Telekom group, including serving as CEO of its ClickandBuy subsidiary, has left the mobile operator. The telco is expected to divest itself of ClickandBuy, a mainly online payments service provider that Deutsche Telekom bought in 2010, which telco chief executive Timotheus Höttges admitted in published comments in May was a mistake. 

The telco, in an unannounced move, last month appointed Stephan Becker, formerly of the German savings bank group Deutscher Sparkassen, to take Vesco’s place as senior vice president of payments for the group, a position that includes mobile payments and NFC services launched in Germany, as well as branch T-Mobile operators in Poland, Hungary and Slovakia. Becker, among other things, will try to recruit more banks to be part of the telco’s MyWallet app.