First Investment Bank AD of Bulgaria, commonly known as Fibank, announced that it is the first bank in the region to launch a payments feature within its mobile banking app, according to a press release. The bank is using MasterCard's certified Host Card Emulation technology to enable contactless payments with the app.

The bank said in the announcement that it has also worked with MeaWallet, ABnote, SimplyTap and Tieto on the project.

"Fibank is glad to offer a novice product to its customers," Svetoslav Moldovansky, executive director at Fibank, said in a statement. "Fibank's mobile app customers using an NFC-enabled Android handset can choose to add the digital card within the Fibank's mobile app and perform a contactless payment in-store by tapping the NFC-enabled POS-terminal to complete the payment, simple and secure."

Fibank claims this is one of the first commercial HCE/NFC banking projects in Europe. The first phase supports the MasterCard payment scheme, and the next phase will support the scheme from Visa Cloud Based Payments, according to the announcement.