Visa launches smart sunnies so festival goers can leave their wallets at home

FESTIVAL-goers today will ditch their wallets and pay with smart sunglasses as another step towards the ultimate wearable wallet.

Model Kate Peck tries out the WaveShades sunglasses that can be used to buy goods at the St Jerome’s Laneway Festival. Picture: Brett Costello

FESTIVAL-goers today will experience a taste of life in the cashless future by leaving their wallets at home and using a prototype of smart sunglasses to buy their food and drinks.

Visa and sunglass manufacturer Local Supply has produced about 150 WaveShades sunglasses for trial in a pilot study at the St Jerome’s Laneway Festival events today in Melbourne and next week in Sydney.

The WaveShades have been fitted out with a prepaid payment chip, allowing the wearer to make contactless payments with a swipe of their sunnies.

The crowd at Tash Sultana at St. Jerome's Laneway Festival at the RNA Showgrounds, Brisbane on Australia Day. A great place not to carry a wallet. Photo: Claudia Baxter

Visa’s head of product in Australasia Rob Walls said the sunglasses would not be available for general use at this year’s festival but the pilot could lead to them being offered for sale in the future.

In the pilot study, the smart sunglasses will be loaded with $50 in credit but if they get released as a product they will be linked to a bank account and so can be loaded with any prepaid amount.

Kate Peck, who will be trying out the WaveShades at the Sydney Festival, called them a “really interesting collaboration”.

These glasses will be loaded with $50 credit for the trail. Picture: Brett Costello

“It’s using fashion with technology and it’s everything that festival-goers need because we don’t want to be carrying around things,” she said.

“It just makes everything more convenient, it means I don’t have to carry a wallet.

“It’s just minimising everything for our lifestyle. That’s what we want — we’re time poor and we want things to be as simple as possible.

“I’m a big fan of technology, especially when it’s used for fashion because it works so well within our lifestyles. It’s what we demand as a customer.”

With mobile payment systems on smartwatches and smartphones becoming increasingly popular, Juniper Research predicts mobile and wearable payments will hit $100 billion globally by next year.

The WaveShades are fitted with a prepaid Visa chip. Picture: Brett Costello

Mr Walls said payment companies and fashion companies were continuing to push the boundaries in developing new products.

Barclays in the United Kingdom has teamed up with fashion company Topshop to produce a series of key chains that can be used for payments while Visa produced a smart ring for Olympians to pay for their goods at the recent Rio Olympics.

Another example in the United Kingdom is a hiking jacket that has an embedded payment chip, and in the US some activity trackers are fitted with payment chips so that people can buy a drink during their run or at the gym.

The Apple Watch provides tap and go contactless payment technology already in Australia.

Mr Walls said the St Jerome’s Laneway Festival was an ideal place to test new wearable payment systems.

“Millennials really want to go unwired,” he said.

“At a music festival when they’re carrying a bottle of water and their sunglasses but they still want to make payments for food and beverages, not having cash is an ideal scenario.”

Mr Walls said wearable payment chips had the same security of other payment systems and the prepaid sunglasses could be blocked from further payments if they went missing or were stolen.

“Our focus is to ensure that whatever is used is enabled in a very secure and convenient way,” he said.

Australians with an American Express card have been able to use their iPhone and Apple Watch for contactless payments since 2015.

Mr Walls said this year was likely to see a number of new mobile payment systems in Australia using wearable technology.

“That is a really logical form of payment to be enabled going forward,” he said.

“We’re working with a large range of device manufacturers, whether it is motor vehicles that have payment enabled in the head unit of the car so you can make payments as you go through drive-throughs to Samsung with their smart fridges.

Contactless payments take place on most public transport systems throughout the world.

“It’s just a really interesting space to watch from a consumer perspective.

“Australia is really well placed because we have got a highly active consumer base and we’re really early adopters of technology.

“There’s a ‘let’s try it’ rather than be suspicious of it attitude with the Australian consumer.”

Nearly eight in 10 face-to-face Visa transactions in Australia are now contactless payments.