Payment companies are trying to push their boundaries of innovation, as wearable tech is becoming more mainstream. We can find this push of boundaries in this week itself that saw launch of two new payment-enabled wearable devices – Movado announced the launch of a line of smartwatches that will likely enable contactless payment functionality to ‘Kerv’ a new contactless payment ring, launched in the UK.
Barclaycard’s wearables a UK card issuer, saw £6.6 million ($8 million) in transactions from July 2016 to February 2017, and Tractica, a market intelligence firm expects the volume of these wearables to grow to up to $501 billion by 2020.
According to BI Intelligence “payment functionality will be included in 62% of wearable device shipments by 2020.” In markets with huge user base for contactless payment this could act as a catalyst for larger adoption.
I feel that customers are getting more and more interested in wearable payments but it is not likely that they may buy a new wearable just for making payment transactions. They are more interested in using multi-purpose accessories that allow them to do more than just payment, a best example of that would be smart watches, providing additional applications for other purposes. So, companies might have more success focusing on multipurpose offerings or integrating payments into products users already own or might buy rather than selling a dedicated payment device.
Reference: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-whats-holding-back-wearable-payments-2017-3