NFC Times Exclusive: Both Visa and MasterCard plan to offer their own HCE services to banks and other issuers to help the financial institutions launch host-card emulation, as the payment networks continue to try to expedite the rollout of HCE technology for NFC mobile payments, NFC Times has learned.

The payment networks are expected to offer the HCE services to banks that do not have their own HCE vendors. But while the payment networks are expected to work with vendors to help deliver these services, they would put Visa and MasterCard in competition with other HCE vendors. 

“Visa will be coming out with something; it will be an on-behalf of service, and the issuer will be able to go to Visa and say, ‘Hey, Visa, why don’t you host my secure application on your server,’” one North American banker planning to eventually launch HCE-based payments told NFC Times.