Contactless Payment in a Glove? Barclaycard Gives It a Trial by Fire

December 25, 2023 by

Image credit: Barclaycard

Not so long ago, Barclaycard ran a survey that asked 2,000 people about Christmas shopping behavior.

What was most requested from that survey was stunning, and quickly became the next major item of development.

Specifically, the survey requested “gloves you could pay with” as the number one requested item, follow by rings, and bracelets. While there were a host of representatives in the wearable device sector overall—handbags and scarves were found on the list, as were hats—gloves were the clear front-runner, and gloves were just what Barclaycard developed, running trials on the wearable devices in perhaps the highest-stress circumstance a payment system can see: Christmas shopping.

Barclaycard developed what’s described as a “small number” of so-called “pay gloves,” which it then handed out for use at the roughly 300,000 locations in the U.K that could take contactless payments. The gloves themselves, at last report, are simple woolen gloves of the kind that most anyone might wear at this time of year, and are designed to be not only payment systems, but also to work with touch screens and similar devices.

The gloves can work in both credit and debit modes, and come standard with a bPay contactless chip that links to the appropriate account to work as credit or debit. All a user need do is tap on the contactless terminal of choice, and the payment is made accordingly.

Basically, what this does is allows shoppers—hands and arms already laden with purchases—to simply tap a screen and make the necessary payments, without having to shift a load around to reach into a pocket and get a payment mechanism out. That’s a huge boost for convenience, and early reports suggest that these could be ready for the wider field by Christmas 2015.

There’s a value to this, of course, in that it would likely make a pickpocket’s job a much tougher affair. After all, when your payment device of choice is currently covering your hands, it’s hard to take said payment device without drawing notice. And how would enterprising thieves be able to tell, anyway, if the gloves you were wearing were payment gloves or just an ordinary everyday pair of handwarmers? That’s not an easy matter to figure, especially on the fly.

After all, we’re looking at a system that can be compressed to the size of a single chip and put into just about anything from rings to bracelets and beyond. Better, the market is well-acquainted with the possibilities as well; look what it asked for. It asked for gloves and rings and bracelets, as well as handbags and scarves and hats.

Consumers already know that these things are possible. This could be an exciting prospect, and it’s one that shows the value of mobile payment systems.

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