Getting married to Visa gets a whole new meaning.
If you are planning on attending the Olympic Games in Rio this August, do make sure you have a Visa card on you, since that is the only way to pay at the official venues.
Although it’s an incredibly sweet deal for Visa, but rather than rest on its laurels, the company is all set to use the event to introduce its new wearable – a ring that people can pay with by just waiving their hands. No more wallets, mobile phones and even batteries are required.
The ring has a simple design: while the interior houses a secure microchip from Gemalto along with an embedded antenna, the exterior has simply a white or a black ceramic loop. There is no decoration or dye since these interfere with the antenna.
Although the ring will be custom fitted, the trial run has 20 sizes for testers. The initial group of testers includes employees and partners but also notably the forty five athletes sponsored by it, including Ibtihaj Muhammad, a fencer, and Missy Franklin, a swimmer.
Standard wearables, including wallets and smartphones could be a potential source of annoyance for athletes participating in the games since they are constantly in and out of uniforms.
Ashton Eaton, a decathlete, told Visa that he wanted a wearable that he could integrate into his daily routine and just forget about it. Thus came about the idea of a ring, which is not only inconspicuous but also never needs charging. Additionally it is water resistant to 50 meters.
In order to transact, the ring draws a tiny bit of power from the payment terminal. It is on par with swiping cards without having to exchange tons of data such as Apple Pay, or Android Pay.
For occasions when contactless payments are not possible, Visa provides a card along with the ring.
Unfortunately, rings have a tendency to go missing. So Visa has had to prepare for that eventuality by allowing to disable the payment band through a smartphone so that finders don’t become keepers of someone else’s money.
Thanks to its usage of tokenization, Visa has solved the problem of processing payments without having to exchange any kind of personal information.
Although currently the ring is only a prototype, and will not be available to the public in time for Rio, however, the event will be a good testing ground for this technology.









