NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Australia’s AMP Bank said it chose to launch mobile-payments with host-card emulation over other NFC technologies because of the “wider reach” the technology offers, since it’s “available to all NFC-enabled Android mobile phones running KitKat or later,” the bank’s director digital, Michael Weeding, told NFC Times.

AMP, a small bank that is part of an investment, pension and insurance group, is the latest financial institution in Australia to jump onto the HCE bandwagon with the addition of HCE-based payments.

The bank is adding HCE mobile payments with a Visa payWave debit application, which it calls AMPwave, to its existing AMP mobile-banking application.