Thursday , March 28, 2024

Discover Teams Up with FitPay To Provide Contactless Payments With Wearables and IoT Devices

Discover Financial Services cardholders will be able to make point-of-sale contactless purchases with wearables and Internet of Things devices that use FitPay Inc.’s FitPay Payment Platform under an agreement announced Monday by the two companies.

The new service will provision payment credentials using the Discover Digital Exchange, Riverwoods, Ill.-based Discover’s tokenization engine. In addition to Discover cardholders, the service will be available to holders of cards from Discover’s alliance partners.

“With the advancements of mobile technology, the way customers interact with merchants is being re-imagined with an eye toward more secure and convenient methods of payment,” Diane Offereins, Discover’s president of payment services, said in a news release. “This integration with FitPay is one more way in which Discover is continuing to enhance the payment experience and provide more options for our cardholders on how and where they pay.”

FitPay’s platform enables wearable and IoT device manufacturers to add contactless-payment capabilities to their products, making it possible for consumers to pay for goods and services at near-field communication (NFC)-enabled POS terminals with a tap, the companies said. The process is similar to the way consumers can use payment-enabled smart phones at NFC terminals.

“Making payments easy, secure, and frictionless requires building an extensive ecosystem,” Michael Orlando, FitPay president and chief operating officer of its parent company, Melbourne, Fla.-based authentication-technology vendor NXT-ID Inc., said in the release. “Discover is a unique and important part of that ecosystem, and we are very pleased to be able to make the network available to devices on the FitPay platform.”

FitPay said manufacturers of 15 IoT and wearable devices are integrating with its platform. The company expects manufacturers to make product announcements later this year.

Investors apparently expect the Discover agreement to lift FitPay’s business. NXT-ID’s stock boomed in pre-market trading after the announcement came out, and its shares were trading for about $3.00 Monday morning on the Nasdaq Capital Market, up 37% over Friday’s $2.18 close, according to Yahoo! Finance.

The Discover news comes on the heels of FitPay’s announcement last week that it has started taking pre-orders for Flip, a coin-shaped device that lets users convert cryptocurrency to dollars and make contactless purchases with NFC links. Deliveries for the $29 device are expected to start in the second quarter.

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