Optus unveils smartwatch to pay for goods under $100

SHOPPERS will soon be able to pay for goods by waving their “smartwatch” in front of a retail terminal, under an Optus plan.

OPTUS will introduce payments by smartwatch by year’s end and has flagged the possibility of supplying customers with other wearables such as intelligent watch straps for contactless payments.

Optus’s move, announced in Barcelona today at Mobile World Congress, comes just days before Apple reveals more details of its upcoming smartwatch and its own Apple Pay payments system.

The Optus initiative makes use of its existing ‘Cash by Optus’ scheme where users wave their NFC enabled Android smartphone in front of a retail terminal.

It’s a smartphone version of payWave and is limited to purchases up to $100.

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Vicki Brady, Optus managing director, customer, said the company had received great feedback on Cash by Optus. About 70 per cent of purchases were under $50 and almost half related to food.

Optus has teamed up with developed ConnectedDevice and Visa to offer the new smartwatch technology which was a ‘proof of concept’ initiative at this stage.

Brad Green, vice president of mobile at Visa, said Australia was the most advanced market in the world for contactless payments, and last month in Australia, 60 per cent of in-store purchases made using Visa were contactless, made with Visa payWave.

He said consumers wanted to embrace mobile payments but some factors hadn’t been in place. One issue had been a lack of a ubiquitous technology for mobile payments.

He said the limited rollout of NFC had been an issue but that had changed with Apple’s support for NFC last year. But NFC on Apple devices had bee reserved for Apple Payments and could not be used by other vendors.

The new smartwatch however overcame this issue by making a watch with its own embedded NFC antenna. Payments could be made without the user having their phone. The device also is waterproof.

The watch however can communicate with a smartphone using Bluetooth. An app lets users top up their account, check their balance, and maintain account details.

Mr Green said that in the past few years, partners like Optus had become more important for Visa in the quest to roll out mobile payments technology.

He said the watch payments option offered consumers a consistent experience across different device types.

Optus vice president of mobile marketing Ben White said customers wanted to do more with their mobile and payments and wearables presented an opportunity for this.

Optus was considering bundling the smartwatch with a mobile plan, or it might issue a simple band to all of its customers. An intelligent watch strap was another option.

“This is not a replacement for your credit card or debt card. It intends to replace cash,” he said.

The device has a regular Visa card number and can be used as a prepaid card for transactions online.

Mr White said Optus also was working with Samsung which is rolling out its proprietary Samsung Pay payments system.

In addition to facilitating payments, the watch will show notifications including calendar reminders and will monitor a user’s activity.

Optus hasn’t disclosed the number of customers on its payments system nor the transaction revenue generated. Pricing of the new watch is not available yet.

Chris Griffith travelled to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress courtesy of HTC.