NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Given the poor financial results of U.S.-based Fit Pay, it’s becoming clear that the business case for provisioning of payment cards to wearable devices remains difficult.
Fit Pay–which provides all of the provisioning of credit and debit cards for Garmin Pay globally and which also provisions for SwatchPAY! in Switzerland–has been burning through cash at the rate of $4 million per year, while bringing in just $454,000 over the six months ending in June. That’s according to Fit Pay’s parent, Nxt-ID, which recently announced it was abandoning a plan to spin off Fit Pay into a separate publicly traded company after failing to attract enough investors.
UPDATE: Nxt-ID disclosed it has sold its Fit Pay unit to device maker Garmin, as expected. The price Garmin paid for Fit Pay was only $3.3 million compared with more than $10 million that Nxt-ID had paid to acquire Fit Pay in 2017. And on Wednesday the company named current CFO Vincent Miceli as president and CEO, replacing Gino Pereira.
