Sign of the times: Prepaid contactless wristwatch

A partnership between MasterCard Worldwide, watch manufacturer LAKS and U.K. prepaid card issuer Vincento Payment Solutions Ltd. resulted in the launch of Watch2pay, called the U.K.'s first prepaid contactless wristwatch. The watch is integrated with MasterCard's PayPass near field communication (NFC) technology to enable "Tap & Go" POS purchases of up to 15 British pounds per transaction at over 70,000 U.K. retailers, MasterCard said.

"Since we introduced contactless to the world nearly a decade ago, we've been driving innovation in 'Tap & Go' payments, with nearly 100 million PayPass cards and devices now issued globally," said Matt Lanford, Head of Prepaid at MasterCard Europe.

MasterCard noted that contactless payment wristwatches are already available in Turkey, Poland and a number of markets in Asia. When customers purchase the LAKS watch online, they also receive a general-purpose, reloadable, contactless prepaid card. Both the wristwatch and the card have the same international bank account and personal account numbers.

According to a November 2010 MasterCard case study, Austria-based LAKS has been developing and producing contactless payment watches since 2002 and has been a MasterCard PayPass-approved vendor since 2006. For the contactless wristwatch implementation in Poland, MasterCard and LAKS teamed with Bank Zachodni WBK, which acted as issuer and processor of wristwatch/card payments. The case study said LAKS estimated that, by the end of 2011, there will be between 75,000 and 160,000 PayPass- enabled watches in circulation in Poland, the U.K., Italy, Germany, Turkey and the United States.

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