"We've seen this as a vehicle for innovation for financial institutions, for merchants, for others who want to enable payment using the mobile device," Visa's Sam Shrauger has explained at MWC 2014, just a few days after the payment network announced its adoption of host card emulation (HCE) for NFC and QR payments.

SHRAUGER: "We obviously wouldn't be doing this if we didn't feel comfortable with the security of the technology"

"Consumers are doing more and more with their devices; they're using their devices for a lot of non-payment applications, increasingly starting to use them for payment," Shrauger said. "We want to support that and we have supported it with secure element-based models for some time."

"Just like everything else that we do as a payment industry, we believe security is first and foremost the thing that needs to be inherent in the payment system.

"Everything that we are doing with our cloud-based implementation is based on the tokenization standards that we have announced last fall, which are really intended and designed to inherently embed security in this type of implementation for mobile payments and many others as well.

"We obviously wouldn't be doing this if we didn't feel comfortable with the security of the technology itself but also the tools that we're embedding in the payment system to enable that implementation to happen securely, and that's largely again based on the tokenization standards that we announced last fall."

"We obviously acted on this [HCE] very quickly," Shrauger continued. "In a matter of a few short months we jumped on that and inherently believe that this is an opportunity."

"What we see this as is a vehicle of innovation by others; we're a payment system and our job is to scalably, securely, reliably enable transactions to happen instantly around the world, that's what we do. There are a lot of ways that that can happen and we view this as a technology that enables that to happen in new ways and that's why we jumped in very quickly."

"I think that there is just a lot of belief that this is a big enabler for innovation in the space and again, in many other spaces too. We keep talking about payment but there are a whole bunch of opportunities that I think this enables as well and we just want to do our part to make the payment system support the innovation that can be done around payment," he added.