Crunchfish introduced App-integrated Card Emulation (ACE) offering the security of Mobile Card Emulation (MCE) without sacrificing the scalability provided by tokenized card payments with Host-based Card Emulation (HCE). Card payments is a common payment method that banks offer their customers. To enable card payments from a mobile device in a secure way that is scalable to all customers have proven to be difficult.

It is either limited to users of select mobile devices or operators (MCE) or alternatively only available for e-commerce or terminal purchases that requires online clearing. The ground-breaking mobile technology that Crunchfish has developed for offline payments is also applicable for mobile card payments. This whitepaper by Crunchfish introduces App-integrated Card emulation (ACE) as a novel way of card emulation.

The initial section relates ACE to other ways of Card Emulation (CE) - Mobile Card Emulation (M CE) using a hardware-based Secure Element (SE) and Host-based Card Emulation ("HCE") with tokenized payment credentials. The second section discusses Implementation Architectures using hardware-based as well as software-based protection. The third section discusses Data Integrity during runtime operation, for stored data at rest and for data in transit.

The conclusion includes a comparison table of MCE, HCE and ACE that summarizes the points raised in the three sections of this whitepaper.