Visa and Maybank Pilot Asia’s First Contactless Payment Watch

Another interesting piece of news reached my inbox this week, where there's going to be a new watch system to pay for your purchases contactlessly.  Visa and Maybank recently launched an internal pilot of Watch2Pay, the first contactless payment watch in Asia. Watch2Pay allows users to conduct contactless payments in a matter of seconds, leveraging on Visa’s payWave contactless technology, at more than 3,000 Visa payWave contactless readers across the country. 

Visa and Maybank Pilot Asia’s First Contactless Payment Watch 

Consumer payment preferences have evolved over the years. Besides moving to cashless, consumers increasingly want to make payments in a faster and more convenient way, such as contactless transactions. Based on the Visa Consumer Payment Attitudes Study  68 per cent of Malaysian respondents said that they would choose to visit a store that accepted contactless payments over one that did not. 

“Visa has partnered with Maybank to launch an internal pilot of Asia’s first contactless payment watch Watch2Pay, because we believe that Malaysian consumers are ready for new innovations in contactless payments. In December last year, Visa and Maybank introduced the Maybank Visa payWave Micro Tag, which can be attached to a mobile phone and used to complete contactless payments within a few seconds. With Watch2Pay, we are able to bring payments to an even more exciting level and transform the payment experience for consumers,” said Mr. Ng Kong Boon, Visa Country Manager for Malaysia. 

Maybank Group Head of Cards & Wealth, Mr. B Ravintharan and Mr. Ng Kong Boon, Visa Country Manager for Malaysia giving it a go

“Contactless payments have taken off positively in Malaysia and we have been working hard with our clients to expand the acceptance and issuance of Visa payWave cards across the country. So far, we have well over 1.5 million Visa payWave cards in circulation and a rapidly growing acceptance footprint. We’ve also seen year-on-year growth of over 300 per cent in payment volume and 100 per cent in transactions as of December 2014,” he added. 

Watch2Pay was recently featured in January 2015’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and is available in only four other countries (Poland, the Czech Republic, Serbia, and Austria). 

Maybank Group Head of Cards & Wealth, Mr. B Ravintharan said the pilot of this new payment innovation, provides Maybank with multiple strategic options that are currently under evaluation. This will help propel Maybank into the forefront of non-cash and electronic payments.

Exciting new tech

“This is part of an ongoing effort to enhance Maybank’s value proposition to our customers. Such a pilot not only allows us to evaluate key technologies that we feel are best suited to our customers, it also helps us understand specific customer behaviours and fine-tune our propositions accordingly,” added Ravintharan. 

“We see much potential and opportunity for such wearables to create convenient and relevant payment experiences that truly change the way people make their day-to-day payments.”

Merchants that have installed Visa payWave readers in Malaysia including AEON, AEON Big, Chatime, Coffee Bean, Jaya Grocer, Krispy Kreme, Mydin, Radio Shack, TGV Cinemas, KLIA Express, Sogo and more will be rolled out this year.  Now I'm definately interested to see how it runs, but I still wish they made a better looking watch.