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LAKS Introduces Mobile Payments Without a Smartphone

January 10, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

Mobile payment systems, for some time now, have had one fairly common thread involved: most of the time such programs couldn’t be run without a smartphone involved.

Indeed, even the Apple Watch is said to require the aid of an iPhone 6 or iPhone 5S to carry out mobile payments, though there are reports that such need will be merely temporary.

However, there may be a couple of device makers ready to beat Apple itself to the punch, and one exhibited at the CES event in Las Vegas: LAKS.

LAKS developed a mobile payment wearable known as Watch2Pay, and it’s working with MasterCard in a bid to allow the device to make contact with contactless sales terminals.

This is accomplished via the simple expedient of MasterCard adding a small card to the LAKS’ superstructure, which is said to look like a SIM card, but with an NXP secure element included that’s issued to the watch’s owner. Then, the sales terminals in question can interact with the chip in question, and take payment from the user’s MasterCard account.

Future LAKS developments, according to Sami Nassar, who serves as vice president of NXP, will put the secure element directly into the watch’s circuit boards without the need for an intermediary system. Some, meanwhile, have wondered if the watch’s overall aesthetic might get some retooling as well, but that’s mostly a matter of conjecture.

LAKS is currently only available in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Serbia, but even with so small a market on hand, it’s still managing to do something downright amazing: it has effectively beaten Apple to market.

Sure, the word is that the Apple Watch will be able to do likewise, but not until sometime in 2015, and probably then, late in 2015. LAKS is doing this right now, and LAKS and Watch2Pay are already looking for a partner in the United States, so it’s clear that it’s planning to expand the brand.

Admittedly, it might be a tough sell—while LAKS is an incredibly convenient option (will there be that many willing to trust credit card details and the like to a brand that few in the United States have likely even heard of?)—it could end up with a success.

The technology is sound. It’s already in use. What if it were to rebrand under a more familiar name, like, say, Samsung? That might put a little extra perk in the sales. Or it could just license the technology out to another vendor, and make a successful run that way.

There are certainly plenty of possibilities, and it’s got quite some time to explore them before Apple and its massive brand can swing in and gut the market.