Coin today announced a developer program for accelerating the integration of payments into wearables.
The program will enable access to the MasterCard Digital Enablement Service (MDES) to securely digitize MasterCard payment credentials and further reduce the barrier to entry for device manufacturers.
The program, compatible with a range of wearables such as fitness bands, smart watches and jewelry, is online at http://developer.onlycoin.com. Approved developers will have access to Coin’s proprietary technology for enabling payments in a scalable way, and later this year, to digitized MasterCard credentials though Coin’s integration with MDES. This expands upon the companies’ previously announced partnership, underscoring the companies’ commitment to make it as simple as possible for wearables makers to enable payments.
The research firm Tractica forecasts that the volume of wearable payment transactions will grow to $501 billion by 2020. The anticipated growth is fueled by consumers’ demand and expectation that wearables will shift from single-use to multi-purpose products. For example, 46% of 31-40 year olds prefer to bank with wearables according to Intelligent Environment’s survey of 2000 people.
But integrating payments functionality has historically been incredibly costly, complex and slow. It can take several million dollars just to set up the requisite backend services. As Coin has already gone through the certification process, the developer program includes quick access to MDES, reducing vital time-to-market.
The developer program has no upfront infrastructure fees for wearables makers (beyond the nominal cost of hardware) and offers a free tier for early stage companies building a customer base. For products that have wider adoption, the Coin model is based on a product engagement basis so developers only get charged when users are engaging with payments on the wearable device. This aligns the success of MasterCard, Coin and developer program participants. The developer program provides a transparent process for fast access to tools and documentation – allowing device manufacturers to benefit from both MasterCard’s and Coin’s respective domain expertise.
“We’ve long recognized the tremendous potential developers have to shape the future of commerce, and we have worked hard to provide the building blocks to help fuel this innovation. We’re excited to extend our partnership with Coin to enable developers to leverage the MDES platform and the MasterCard Digital Enablement Express program to rapidly enhance their creations and to stand out in today’s device-driven world,” said Sherri Haymond, senior vice president, Digital Payments & Labs at MasterCard.
“Signing up for the Coin developer program gives wearables manufacturers transparent access to a turnkey solution,” said Kanishk Parashar, CEO and Co-Founder of Coin. “The program makes commerce accessible to device makers as payments on wearables become table stakes. We are confident that our miniaturized and secure payment technology, combined with MasterCard’s tokenization, will benefit our wearables partners with increased engagement of their products.”