PayPal Wants to Talk Wearables as a ‘Payment Experience’

At first blush, it may sound like the kind of pomposity only a marketing department can dream up. But taking a closer look at the idea “payment experiences” as PayPal describes it is worth the second glance.

Recently, PayPal Wallet senior director Varun Krishna offered up a look at how PayPal Wallet might be able to work with wearable devices to produce a whole new way to shop and pay for items.

Krishna led off by noting the huge rise in wearable devices over the course of the last few years, and noting in turn that companies were actively working to develop apps for this popular new platform.

With more devices and ways to use these than ever, it made plenty of sense for the mobile payments market to attempt to get in on the action and offer up a new way to shop.

Naturally, from there, the question became one of whether or not wearables would do the job as a payment platform. Not surprisingly, Krishna believes the answer to be a sound yes on that front, noting that “As long as people feel their wearable device is bringing them added value and making their life easier, they will use it for many different use cases.”

Reasonable enough on the surface; if people find a device useful, they’ll use that device in many different ways, a fact that’s been successfully proven since the days of the PC and beyond.

Krishna further asserted that wearables represent something of an extension of mobile.

With some believing that, eventually, mobile devices will replace the smartphone, it’s not hard to see mobile devices doing everything that mobiles do now. Indeed, in many cases, wearables and mobile devices work together to produce results; few wearables have sufficient processing power to stand alone, and thus are often seen working with a smartphone to produce the full experience.

Way back in 2010, there was a commercial featuring a man in a sinister-looking overcoat sweeping items off shelves and shuffling them in said overcoat. He was stopped on his way out of the store by a man who looked like a security guard or the like, and while most of us were expecting a confrontation in the making, the security guard-analogue held out a slip of paper and said “You forgot your receipt.”

This was to imply that the man had already paid for his purchases, and was only being stopped for the most minor of issues rather than being called on a massive shoplifting spree. At the time, this was designed to promote a radio frequency identification (RFID) system that IBM was working on, but the idea seems to have carried over to the wearable device market.

Indeed, there is no more mobile payment system than the payment system that’s worn. The idea that a small button on a shirt or a coat pocket or the like could contain payment data isn’t at all out of line, and the idea that it could automatically interface with a POS system is even less outlandish.

While there will always be a certain portion of the population that has no interest in such systems and would prefer to use cash, check or credit card, the convenience of a wearable system will likely be hard for many to pass up.

It’s not hard to imagine mobile payment systems becoming wearable payment systems, and many companies have already been seen preparing for this idea.

Apple Pay, after all, is part of the Apple Watch, and though some say using the Apple Watch at a drive-thru looks a bit on the stupid side, the practical technology is already in place. Polishing up the aesthetics and execution is likely only a matter of time.