NFC TIMES Exclusive – Switzerland-based watchmaker Swatch plans to roll out its SwatchPAY! contactless payments service to a number of European countries and then perhaps globally, representing budding competition to Apple Pay, Fitbit Pay and Garmin Pay. But unlike these three smartwatch-enabled Pays services and others, SwatchPAY! uses low-cost analog watches as its payments devices.
The Swatch watches support only one payment card each on their embedded contactless chips. And as passive wearables–which have no rechargeable batteries to power Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or even NFC controllers–they require a special provisioning system, for now using a dedicated NFC reader/writer to communicate with the passive contactless chips inside the watches. The readers are placed in Swatch stores.
After a consumer buys an eligible watch, the store clerk or even the consumer herself would place the watch on the reader to receive tokenized card credentials sent from provisioning companies and loaded onto the banking-grade contactless chips in the watches. That’s after the user downloads the SwatchPAY! app on her phone and requests the tokenized version of her preferred debit or credit card (as long as it is participating in SwatchPAY!).
