there are times that you hear some terms and you have no idea what they mean, HCE is one of those that you hear or see when you are buying a new device or surfing the internet, sentences like "Google added HCE to Android KitKat", or "Blackberry have been supporting HCE for years now". in this post I am going to write a short and non-technical (2-3 minutes) description about HCE technology and the reasons behind its creation.

Host Card Emulation - HCE

Host Card Emulation - HCE is a technology wich tries to bring security and provide a secure solution for devices with no secure element.The Idea behind it is to make your mobile phone behave as a smart card in a way that Point Of Sale can not distinguish between your card and your mobile phone in contactless transactions.

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In HCE technology, the device uses the operation system(for processing data), not the Secure Element. in other words, HCE is a technology that allows a smartphone to act as a smart card on an NFC-enabled device without relying on the secure element.

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This technology allows merchants to accept contactless payment solutions on the Android devices(apple pay uses tokenization with a different topology) without the need of a secure element.
it increases the number of devices which are able to use NFC terminals massively, prior to this technology NFC was dependent on a secure element.

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the great thing about HCE is that there is no need to change the infrastructure or add any new one which is time-consuming and will be costly for merchants and PSPs. a merchant that was capable of accepting NFC transactions, is able to do the same with HCE. with HCE you can easily pay with your wearable devices and you don't need to worry about capturing your data being hijacked on the air by different NFC-related hacking devices.

Thank you for reading my post

@meysam