While Delhi Metro Rail Corporation tries to get contactless credit/debit transactions on its platform, an Austrian company has launched its smartwatch in India for making ride payments.
LAKS, an Austrian company, was established in 1986 by Lucas Alexander Karl Scheybal. Scheybal is also the inventor of Watch2Pay, the first NFC watch worldwide approved for contactless Mastercard payments. DMRC has now partnered with the company to bring contactless payments through this smartwatch Watch2Pay.
At the moment, users can purchase tokens to ride the metro or use Delhi Metro prepaid card to take rides. This watch will work like the prepaid card and you will be able to recharge it like any other metro card.
The smartwatch is available online for purchase from Paytm starting Rs. 2,999 with a lot of different options of materials used on the strap as well as the dial.
“These watches, called Watch2Pay, are available through an online e-commerce site. The new facility is expected to provide commuters with a more convenient and faster access to the Delhi Metro network. The commuter will simply have to touch the watch to the screens of the AFC [Automatic Fare Collection] gates at the metro stations to get access,” said a DMRC statement.
How does it work?
An integrated antenna and an insertable RF-Watchcard makes this watch a versatile RFID credential which can be used in many contactless applications including transit, payment, access, leisure and NFC. It has a MasterCard PayPass-enabled RF-Watchcard to allow contactless payments.
To use a Watch2Pay smartwatch, you have to insert a RFID card, that looks exactly like a sim card, into the watch. No battery power is required for making contactless transactions. You can change the RFID card whenever you want to change your payment card.
The Top-up of these SIM-sized smart cards can be done through all the methods of recharge available to the commuters at present. Top up of the Delhi Metro smart cards through credit cards/ debit cards and net banking is already available for the commuters. Recently, DMRC also launched the top up facility of smart cards through ICICI Bank’s Business Correspondent Networks (Outlets) located across Delhi-NCR.
This new payment method will be very convenient for customers, but we wish there was an app instead for Android and iOS to allow NFC payments at metro stations. Having a specific device for the same limits a lot of users. In fact, the price of the device also seems to be a higher end.
Smartwatches in India are not even that famous and worth using because of lack of applications in the country. If the Government can bring an app that can do the same at metro terminals, that will benefit the whole country and change the face of contactless transactions.
Source: DMRC
