Consumers eager to use wearables to pay

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  • Innovation

According to the latest figures published by MasterCard earlier today, contactless payments surged by 145% in 2017. Almost a quarter of consumers in Europe stated an interest in using wearables for payments. In the Netherlands, almost 80% of payment terminals are compatible with contactless payment, and more than 50% of card payments are now contactless.

Run on wearables

Earlier this year ABN AMRO announced its plans to conduct a test – with help from its clients – to use new wearables for payments. In less than a week 6,000 clients had signed up for the test. The first 250 clients have since taken receipt of their wearables in Amsterdam’s indoor food market ‘Foodhallen’. The remaining 250 clients are scheduled to receive their wearables in The Hague next week.  

According to ABN AMRO’s Payments Product Owner Yvonne Duits, it is important to involve clients in the development process. “Innovations such as this will shape the future of how we pay. We feel that it’s important to take our clients’ feedback on board during the development stage. It’s great to see how enthusiastic our clients are just about the idea of using wearables to pay. With our clients’ input, we’ll use the coming period to look at the feedback and developments, and identify what we need to do to market the concept of payment using wearables to a broader public.”

Read the press release of MasterCard.