Visa tests contactless payment sunglasses (V)

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March 20, 2017 5:47 PM

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At South By Southwest (SXSW), Visa unveiled a proof-of-concept for payment-enabled sunglasses, according to CNBC.

To use them, customers would link payment information to the glasses, presumably through a prepaid product or some type of app or website, and then could simply remove them and tap the side to any NFC-enabled point-of-sale (POS) terminal. The sunglasses aren’t currently available to the public — Visa is simply trying to gauge interest and see if brands or banks would be interested in sponsoring such a product — but they could draw more attention to wearable payments as a concept.

Even though they’re a gimmick, the sunglasses could be an indicator of where payments are headed.

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) offers payments companies an opportunity to expand beyond mobile phones, cards, and point-of-sale devices, to a broad and diverse ecosystem of internet-connected devices.

We forecast that there will be 24 billion connected devices installed globally by 2020, up from nearly 7 billion today. And over 5 billion will be consumer connected devices by 2020, representing a massive expansion of touchpoints that could eventually offer payments functionality.

BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report that dives into the budding industry of connected device payments, providing a rundown of the stakeholders driving innovation in wearables, connected cars, and connected home devices. It also gauges the impact of new payment devices on different payments companies, along with how these devices could shift consumer purchasing behavior.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

In full, the report:

To get your copy of this invaluable guide, choose one of these options:

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of connected device payments.

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