IoT devices will become here, there, and everywhere as most observers believe, with early adoption occurring in home devices and wearables. As the following article reports, Discover is partnering with FitPay’s technology platform for wearables.
Discover Financial Services Inc. and FitPay Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of NXT-ID, and a proprietary technology platform that adds contactless payments to IoT devices, Inc., has announced a network services agreement.
Through this agreement, the devices that are connected with the FitPay Payment Platform will be allowed to provision tokenized payment identification through Discover Digital Exchange (“DDX”).
This agreement will lead to a seamless payment experience for Discover cardholders, along with users of other partner cards. Customers will be able to make contactless payment transactions at retail locations with wearable or Internet of Things (IoT) devices that have payment capabilities powered by FitPay.
The Internet of Things promises to revolutionize the payments industry. Discover Financial sees huge growth opportunity in the expanding IoT payments’ space. The IoT has taken the payment process to the next level, where payments can be made via a broad and diverse ecosystem of Internet-connected devices, such as wearables, connected cars, and smart home devices from the current focus on mobile phones, cards, and point-of-sale devices. The need of the hour is seamless payments through a number of touchpoints.
We expect Discover Financial to increase its IoT partnerships by enabling it to grow its business volume and strengthen its brand name. It is estimated that more than 20.4 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020.
Smartphones have conditioned consumers to shop and pay for goods and services when they want and how they want. So it’s a logical next step that wearables and related IoT devices to become the next phase in enabling convenient and immediate payments.
Overview by Raymond Pucci, Associate Director, Research Services at Mercator Advisory Group
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