Barclaycard Introduces Contactless Payment Gloves

The way we pay for goods and services is changing. It almost seems like it is changing on  daily basis. Business no longer accepting cheques as a method of payment, seems like a lifetime ago, but in fact, it was only a few years back.  The advent of e-commerce has seen the uprising of online payment facilities such as WorldPay and PayPal.  There is now even virtual currency in the form of BitCoin.

The credit card companies are not people to be left in the dark and that shows with Barclaycard’s latest product. Barclaycard has revealed that they are trialling a contactless payment glove, which will enable the wearer to just wave their hand and pay for things. The glove will enable shoppers to ‘tap and pay’ and is being trialled over the Xmas period, in several stores, Barclaycard said.

The gloves are woollen and touchscreen-enabled, so shoppers may use their mobile phones whilst on the move. The most important feature is they are designed to act just as a credit or debit card would do. The gloves are embedded with a bPay contactless payment chip that can be used to pay for transactions of up to the value of £20.

Barclaycard has said they are trialling the gloves after a survey of 2,000 shoppers voted gloves as the most “desired” wearable payment item. Rings and bracelets came second and third, it said.

Mike Saunders, managing director of digital consumer payments at Barclaycard said, ”At some point most of us have experienced the stress of holding bags full of shopping while trying to find a spare hand to get our card out of our purse or wallet to pay…Some may have even been subjected to frustration from those piling up in the queue behind them – so when people told us that being able to pay with gloves would take some of the stress out of their Christmas shopping, we wanted to respond positively to shoppers’ demand.”

45 million contactless cards are in circulation in the UK and a quarter of all plastic new cards were contactless-enabled.

I wonder what the next payment solution is going to be?

[Image via wareable]

SOURCE: http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/article/1326738/barclaycard-boosts-wearable-tech-investment-contactless-gloves