Welcome to the future: Drone Pay

Forget Apple Pay, MasterCard's selfie pay and bitcoin, Finextra has seen the future of payments and it is Drone Pay.

Figures out today show that Brits have embraced contactless payments, with spending on tap and pay cards rising more than three-fold, to £7.75 billion, in 2015.

But the boys (of a certain age) at Consult Hyperion think that there is still room for improvement and have spent their Friday developing a "multi-card remote payments" system.

The device, consisting of a couple of cards stuck to a small drone, enables the user to save valuable walking energy by flying their payment to the point-of-sale.

And it's fast too - in this video, Dave Birch goes from lift-off to payment in under 90 seconds.

Of course, there is the chance of a system crash or user error:

...or card clash:

Drones have other potential financial services applications. Taking a leaf out of Amazon's playbook, during a hackathon in November Mondo's Simon Vans-Colina built a card delivery drone. It is not known whether Mondo has decided to adopt the idea.

Channels

Retail banking Payments

Keywords

Cards Innovation Mobile & online banking

Comments: (5)

A Finextra member 26 February, 2016, 15:24

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Still not as cool as the DCA (Distant Card Access) technology which we will be announcing on 1 April this year - it let's you pay of any card of your choice around you ))

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David Birch - Tomorrow's Transactions - London 26 February, 2016, 17:44

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One small engineering clarification: we didn't stick the cards on the drone, we 3d printed the cardholders and then attached them to the drone!

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A Finextra member 29 February, 2016, 03:22

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What perhaps will be a remarkable innovation is if a 3D image of the card is transported for a transaction and when completed, erase itself. :-)

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A Finextra member 29 February, 2016, 10:18

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Brilliant, I'll just program my drone to go to the ATM and getting my cash! :-)

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Hitesh Thakkar - SME - Fintech startups (APAC and Africa) - India 01 March, 2016, 08:26

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Drone pay has more of technology geek sentiment than business case in value chain. I can sense one where Drone is with Merchant / business card and after goods delivered customer does the fund transfer to the merchant's card ( EMV + CHIP + NFC...) or Drone with GSM gateway to complete payment for the delivery of goods ( just as COD).