When wearable contactless payments have that ring of truth
There was a lot of fanfare last week over the final release of the much awaited Kerv ring that links to a Mastercard prepaid account.
The ring, which retails at £99.99, is scratch resistant and waterproof and does not need to be charged or paired with a smartphone. Users can make payments at millions of locations, including on London's transport network, and switch the ring on and off, manage funds and receive transaction alerts via SMS or email. "Our aim was to develop a desirable wearable item, that does not obviously look like a piece of technology. We believe that the Kerv ring makes people’s lives easier - whether that is commuting to work on London underground, buying a coffee, or paying for a round of drinks,” said Philip Campbell, founder of Kerv.
We reported on the Kerv ring back in 2015 and fully expected to see it come to fruition earlier last year. However, the Kerv contactless payment ring concept which raised the required funds to jump to the next stage of manufacture thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, had become caught in an intellectual property dispute last year.
So much so, that Kickstarter put out the following message: “This is a message from Kickstarter’s Integrity team. We’re writing to inform you that a project you backed, Kerv – the world’s first contactless payment ring, is the subject of an intellectual property dispute. The law requires that we remove the project from public view until the dispute is resolved. Because the project already ended successfully, your pledge hasn’t been affected. The creator should still be able to move forward with the project (and send any unfulfilled rewards). If you have any questions, though, you can still message the creator from the project page.”
The company who brought the dispute to to the attention of Kickstarter, NFC Ring, also put out a statement at the time; “We invented the smart ring back in 2010, and worked hard to launch the world’s first smart ring in 2013. We are now selling our new product, a smart ring with cash payments, metro ticketing, and secure access (www.nfcring.com). We shipped our first 5,000 units in August 2016 and launched this product at the Rio Olympics. This has been really hard work and we have worked closely with the community to make it happen. We encountered Phil (Philip Campbell) of Kerv. He announced he was the ‘World’s First’ to make the payment ring after our company already had. He admitted to us in person this is not true. We were informed that he contacted our supplier and used our IP to make his ring possible. It costs us tens of thousands of dollars to develop each piece of IP… we are a startup, this is expensive for us.We offered to license our IP to him for one year, and he ignored our offer. With all of his actions combined, we were forced to bring a legal case against him. He is also ignoring the judge’s orders (such as to remove ‘World’s First’ from his website), which is a very serious issue.”
Its good to see that obviously the dispute was closed with the Kerv payment ring finally being released (although no details are being given out) and I am interested to see how Kerv performs in the field, so to speak. Forecasts indicate that a payment functionality will be included in 62% of wearable device shipments by 2020. That could be a catalyst for adoption, particularly in markets where users are already accustomed to paying contactlessly, because it’s putting features in the users’ hands. And up to now, customers seem to be testing the service out — UK card issuer Barclaycard’s wearables line saw £6.6 million ($8 million) in transactions between July and February, and Tractica expects wearable volume to grow to up to $501 billion by 2020. And remember - only last week we reported from the 2017 MWC about the Samsung-Ingenico-Smartlink-backed Contactless Companion Platform (CCP) initiative which enables multiple wearable devices to be used for payment.
But as always there is a caveat. Customers are interested in wearable payments. But it’s unlikely that they will buy a new product, like a ring, for the express purpose of using it for transactions, especially if that product is very expensive. Instead, survey data from Barclaycard shows that UK consumers are most interested in retrofitting existing jewellery and wearables for contactless products. As such, multifunction products, like smartwatches, could succeed in the payments realm — as has the Apple Watch, for example. But companies might have more success focusing on multipurpose offerings or integrating payments into products users already own or might buy rather than selling a dedicated payment device.
The ring can also be used to unlock doors via the NFC technology that’s built into the ring if people have a compatible lock. Access control AND payments, so does this count as a multi-purpose offering? Time to break out your inner Jedi...
Until next week.
Steve Atkins
Contactless Intelligence
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