NFC Times Exclusive Insight – With its high penetration of contactless POS terminals and strong use of contactless cards, payment networks, banks and telcos have seen Poland as a test bed for NFC payments. 

Although SIM-based NFC payments have not taken off in Poland, Visa Europe and MasterCard Worldwide, which are believed to have subsidized much of the contactless infrastructure in Poland, now see the country as a key market in which to try out host-card emulation. 

It seems unlikely that Visa can make good on its recent announcement that nine Polish banks will launch HCE commercially early in 2015, however.