NFC Times Exclusive – Last May, when the venture capital arm of Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, and vendor Sequent Software publicized plans for launching NFC mobile payments with both embedded chips and host-card emulation, the publically stated plan was for short pilots leading to launches before the end of the year.

But the big Russian savings bank, which was going to be among the first to launch HCE commercially, has yet to launch any commercial service or even public pilots with the technology, and to date has managed only to launch an internal trial with 20 Samsung phones equipped with embedded chips. 

The missed targets demonstrate not only the well-known challenges of rolling out secure element-based NFC on Android phones, but also the complexities of HCE, especially the all-important tokenization piece.