Mastercard partners with Fit Pay to speed up the development of payment-enabled wearables

By

Kate Dingwall

Published
Oct 26, 2016

Mastercard has announced that the company will partner with Fit Pay, enabling the firm's contactless payment services to be integrated into wearables and Internet of Things devices. Through this collaboration, Mastercard cardholders will be given the opportunity to use a wide variety of secure, contactless, payment-enabled wearables.

The two companies will be working with Wearatec, a developer of innovative wearable tech devices, and other manufacturers to payment enable over 2.5 million wearable devices over the course of 2017.

Michael Orlando, co-founder and chief executive officer of Fit Pay stated, “We see a tremendous demand for payment capabilities coming from innovative device manufacturers who recognize the importance to continually expanding the value proposition of their products. Working alongside Mastercard, Fit Pay’s platform can seamlessly add contactless payment capabilities to wearable devices, increasing consumer engagement, creating new revenue streams, and making their devices indispensable.”

Fit Pay is a California-based company that creates contactless payment capabilities for wearable devices. The Fit Pay platform has been essential in quickening of the time-to-market of wearable technology, as well lowering the cost and complexity of payment services of wearables. 

The Fit Pay and Mastercard collaboration will allow over 2.5 million wearables to become payment-enabled in 2017 and over 9 million in 2018. These payment services are an extension of Mastercard’s MDES and Digital Enablement Express programs. These programs were put in place to ensure simple payment options without the threat of fraudulent transactions. 

Kiki Del Valle, Senior Vice President of Digital Payments and Labs at Mastercard stated, “At Mastercard, we are continuously working to enable payments to a whole new generation of devices to give consumers more choice in how they pay. The Commerce for Every Device program puts in place a standard for expanding secure contactless and embedded payment options globally, and our work with Fit Pay and its set of cutting-edge device manufacturers will further help us meet merchant and consumer needs.”