NFC Times Exclusive – The Royal Bank of Canada plans a commercial launch of host-card emulation in 2015 following a small employee pilot of HCE payments, but declined to specify a date, head of payments innovation Jeremy Bornstein told NFC times in an interview.

He added that the bank would continue to operate its hybrid NFC payments service combining cloud-based technologies and SIMs.

The HCE pilot, which is scheduled to run through the current winter season, will involve fewer than 100 RBC employees using debit cards loaded on their Android phones with the Flash contactless application from Canada’s debit scheme, Interac.