NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Following a lull in attention on host-card emulation with the announcement and launch of Apple Pay in the latter half of last year, the buzz appears to be back on HCE, and among the latest organizations promoting it is MasterCard Worldwide.

The payment network this week touted what it says are 25 active HCE mobile-payments projects worldwide, although most are believed to be pilots. In addition, in the run-up to next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, rival Visa, as well as a number of technology vendors are promoting their HCE or tokenization offers, the latter usually going hand-in-hand with HCE.

The vendors include smart card companies Gemalto and Giesecke & Devrient, which in the past, when it came to mobile payments, focused almost entirely on secure elements and trusted service management, not HCE or tokenization.