Nine Polish banks are to launch host card emulation (HCE) based mobile payments services using Visa’s cloud-based payment specifications “from early this year,” allowing their customers to make contactless payments using NFC-enabled Android smartphones.

Taking part are ING Bank Śląski, mBank, Bank Millennium, Raiffeisen Polbank, Eurobank, Getin Bank, Bank Polskiej Spółdzielczości, Bank Smart and Bank Zachodni WBK.

The move follows The National Bank of Poland giving the go-ahead for the launch of Blik, a separate mobile payments service backed by six Polish banks, in November. Visa has confirmed to NFC World+ that the two services are not linked.

“The high number of banks working to deploy Visa mobile payments highlights the sector’s immense interest in the service,” says Jeremy Nicholds, executive director for mobile at Visa Europe.

“Visa’s cloud-based mobile payments can quickly be made available to a large group of consumers and provide a foundation for the bank to offer a wide range of innovative functionalities in the future. Visa’s mobile contactless payment technologies have become an integral part of our Polish members’ mobile banking strategies.”

“Poland has been extremely enthusiastic in embracing contactless payment technology and is already Visa’s largest market in Europe in terms of contactless transaction volumes,” Visa reveals. Close to 70% of Visa cards in the market are contactless, with the technology accounting for more than 40% of all Visa payments in the country.

“More than 75% of all in-store point-of-sale terminals support contactless payment, with plans in place for all Polish POS terminals to support the technology by the end of 2017,” the company adds. “In total, Visa has now enabled over 2.1 million contactless terminals across Europe.”