Crédit Mutuel Arkéa launches HCE mobile payments developed with Antelop

PARTNER NEWS: Customers of French bank Crédit Mutuel Arkéa can now make host card emulation (HCE) based mobile payments using the bank’s Paylib mobile app and authorise payments at the point of sale with a scan of their fingerprint, making it the “first bank offering a fingerprint-supported HCE solution in France”.

Antelop's Nicolas BenadyPaylib is an online payment solution offered by some of the main banks in France and currently allows customers to pay online without having to enter their debit/credit card information from their smartphone, tablet or computer.

Crédit Mutuel Arkéa has now extended its Paylib offering to support in-store payments through HCE, “transforming its app into a converged mobile wallet” using technology supplied by HCE and tokenization provider Antelop Solutions.

“Paylib is the primary online wallet in France,” Antelop CEO Nicolas Bruley told NFC World. “It is a shared platform between banks, but with dedicated mobile apps and services depending on each individual supporting bank’s offering. Each bank integrates their own HCE service through their own dedicated apps.

Security at heart

“We were selected by Crédit Mutuel Arkéa through a competitive request for proposal process, where we really proved the assets and potential of our technology. Security is at the heart of our HCE offering, and Crédit Mutuel Arkéa has been highly supportive of us throughout this process, which started approximately six months ago.

“We have provided Crédit Mutuel Arkéa with our secure and industrialised HCE white-label SDK and back end solution, showing fastest time to market and high-quality integration.”

“It seems that — at least for the time being — the majority of banks in France are deciding to go with HCE issuer wallets, rather than opting to add support for services such as Android Pay and Samsung Pay, and we think this is a very interesting development,” Bruley adds.

Antelop recently contributed to NFC World’s What’s New in Payments report, providing its expertise around security of HCE solutions and insight into the key security issues facing NFC mobile payment providers. You can download the full report here.

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