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digital money
Who Are You Wearing?
inside aPPle watCh
The Apple Watch generated strong buzz even before it launched on April 24, combining the cachet of Apple’s design with new capabilities—including
the opportunity to conduct NFC
payments with a linked iPhone via Apple Pay—in a wearable device. The Apple Watch comes in several designs, with prices ranging from $349 to $17,000 for the 18-karat- gold version. Analysts say what’s most significant about the Apple Watch, compared with previous smartwatches, is the hundreds
of apps available to customize the user experience.
Financial services tools and banking apps designed specifically for the Apple Watch also are getting top
billing among Apple-approved apps, underscoring the opportunity wear- ables may represent for payments and financial services players to extend their brands to a new form factor.
A short list of examples:
• The Citi mobile app enables users to monitor their checking, savings and credit card balances, and get detailed information about their five most recent transactions and optional alerts for payment due dates.
• eBay’s app provides on-the-go monitoring of auctions for those buying and selling products.
• Fidelity’s mobile app offers stock quotes and trading alerts for U.S. and global markets, with the option to connect to the iPhone for active trading.
• The Mint personal finance app summarizes users’ monthly spending goals and tracks their progress toward meeting them.
• The PayByPhone parking app enables users to pay for metered parking via Apple Pay and sends a notification 10 minutes before the meter expires. Users can feed the meter by tapping the watch.
• target CorP.’s app enables Apple Watch users to build a shopping list created on the iPhone and guides shoppers to the next item on their list when inside the store.
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where trust and familiarity are crucial, according to Ketharaman Swaminathan, founder and CEO
of India-based GTM360 Marketing Solutions, who advises companies developing new payments products. “Merely changing the form factor isn’t likely to drive additional rev- enues in payments,” he cautions.
But wearables with payments features are an important area
for the financial services industry
to watch, analysts say. As con- sumers lean more heavily on smartphones for mobile shopping and payments, wearables could serve as important adjuncts to handsets, speeding up and en- hancing routine consumer activities, according to Richard Crone, a retail and payments consultant and founder of Crone Consulting LLC. “Wearables expand consumers’ options, so they can obtain certain types of information quickly and use their smartphone for more com- plex functions or an information deep-dive,” he suggests.
It’s still early days in the evolu- tion of wearables. But, as mer- chants gradually build more useful mobile apps—and technol- ogy matures to pinpoint a shop- per’s exact location—wearable payments technology will be of greater value to consumers, Crone predicts. “When powerful apps for wearable payments technology appear that really
can transform and enhance
the consumer’s in-store or in- restaurant experience, this niche will take off.”