NFC Times Exclusive Insight –Chinese banking giant Industrial and Commercial Bank of China has launched a mobile-payments service using host-card emulation, supporting credit cards branded by China UnionPay and Visa. 

ICBC touts the service, launched commercially last week, as a first HCE payments launch in Asia. It would also be among the first globally to support contactless applications from two payments networks, UnionPay’s Quick Pass and Visa payWave, though it’s not clear how many POS terminals in China support Visa payWave. There are probably not many, while UnionPay has said there are nearly 4 million terminals in China supporting Quick Pass. 

ICBC said users could load UnionPay- and Visa-branded credit cards into NFC phones supporting Android version 4.4.2 or above. And the bank noted that the cards will be tokenized.