The Wearable Experience Not Threading the Needle on Mobile Payments?

The idea of wearable devices being used with mobile payment systems makes sense, on its surface.

Why wouldn’t it? Being able to wear a device that can handle payments to the store means that users don’t have to carry a wallet, or even a smartphone; just the thing on a wrist, finger, lapel or anywhere it happens to be worn. That sounds great, but word from the HCE Payments conference suggests that payments aren’t quite threading the needle when it comes to wearables.

Smartbands were commonly advanced as the mobile payment platform of choice, and some refer to the Apple Watch as an example of how to do the job right.

There’s an underlying issue to that, though: how many people are actually wearing the Apple Watch with any kind of regularity? That lack of actual use of the platform in question puts the whole concept at risk. Yet there’s still some room for this to happen, especially given the growth of smartbands in general.

A recent test at Helixion featured two smartbands—one black and one white—and the discovery was somewhat grim.

Reports suggested that putting cash into the mobile payment system was something of an impediment from the word go—and this may be the worst sign of all—but even actually wearing the band was problematic.

The word from Helixion says it took three days of finagling the app into actually accepting money, and then even putting the band on took two people to get it in place. Use proceeded comparatively smoothly, though there were issues with bands getting caught on sweaters and a lack of loyalty card acceptance.

Thus, the biggest problem seems to be that wearable devices, in some cases, are shooting themselves in the metaphorical foot. Hard to use, harder to interface with, the devices aren’t putting the best foot forward for mobile payments, at least in some cases.

Naturally, this isn’t the case for every device, but when it’s taking two people and three days to get a platform ready to go at the user level, something has gone gravely wrong. This should be a prompt to mobile payments providers to follow the old adage: if you want something done right, do it yourself.

Consider the idea of mobile payments services making devices. Indeed, in some ways, we’re seeing this happen. Apple Pay has the Apple Watch, LG devices will come with G Pay, Samsung devices have Samsung Pay and so on. Here, the horse has come before the cart, and the device makers brought out some great devices before bringing in a mobile payments platform.

That should serve to endear the platform to its user base by making a better overall user experience. It doesn’t matter what something can do if it’s too difficult to actually put to use, so for device makers to add payments platforms makes sense; it puts the horse before the cart, so to speak, and represents a natural outgrowth.

In the end, the platform must be usable before it can be considered to be useful. Mobile payments today often suffer from a lack of a useful platform from which to use it—at least for wearable devices—so right now, the key point is to start by making sure everything works. Once that’s taken care of, make sure there’s a place to use it. With those two points in place, success should follow.