ANZ Backs FitPay Wearable Payments

One of Australia and New Zealand’s biggest banks is now offering its support for the Fit Pay platform. That means users of Fit Pay wearables can make contactless, NFC-based payments using the FitPay payment platform.

It also means that ANZ cardholders will benefit from FitPay’s tokenization security thanks to its Token Requester Program. Any wearable device supporting FitPay has access to this security measure, which replaces a user’s payment information with a digital identifier that is useless to hackers.

In a statement announcing the support, Fit Pay asserted that 15 IoT and wearable device manufacturers “are currently integrating with the FitPay Payment Platform,” adding that announcements of compatible products “are anticipated… through the next year.” The company also asserted that Australia is a world leader in contactless payment adoption, with four in five consumers performing at least one such payment per week.

For ANZ’s part, the company has proven to be an early adopter of new payments technologies, having become one of the first supporters of Apple’s mobile payments platform in Australia even when the country’s other major banks attempted to form a cartel to squeeze it out of the market. Contactless payments through wearables thus seem to be a natural next step for the company.