ICICI Bank, India's largest private sector bank, has introduced payments via NFC on mobile phones. The new payment service will be available to all ICICI Bank card customers in the last week of March when they update the bank's Pockets application. For NFC payments, a smartphone with Android 4.4 or above will be required. The bank has not mentioned whether it will be available to iOS and Windows Phone users. In accordance with the RBI guidelines, customers can make payments upto Rs 2,000 per transaction with the mobile payment solution. The NFC payment solution uses Host Card Emulation (HCE) technology which creates a virtual card for physical credit or debit cards issued by the Bank (basically tokenization). The virtual card bears a different card number, while the credit limit and expiry date remains same as the original physical card. The virtual card resides in the bank’s cloud server. Using the virtual cards, an ICICI Bank customer can initiate electronic payments from NFC enabled smartphones by just waving his/her phone near a contactless merchant terminal. Note, debit and credit cards issued by other banks cannot be used to make an NFC payment. Rajiv Sabharwal, executive director at ICICI Bank, explained that the NFC payments on Pockets will happen only on smartphones with built-in NFC chips and not with NFC stickers which can be attached to phones. Sabharwal also added that the bank has currently deployed about 40,000 machines capable of accepting NFC payments. "ICICI Merchant services are putting up a number of machines. Along…
