Jawbone and American Express are teaming up to bring mobile payments to fitness bands. The new partnership will allow American Express cardholders to use nothing but their fitness band to make purchases at select merchants. A formal announcement from the two companies could come as early as later this week.
The new functionality will only be available on future fitness band products. The Jawbone UP3 which is set to begin shipping and Jawbone’s other current devices will not benefit from this new feature.
While specific details are slim, the new Jawbone products are likely to use NFC to communicate with compatible terminals at participating brick-and-mortar merchants. While availability of such terminals is still limited (less than 10% of U.S. retailers), it is expected to climb quickly as consumers continue to adopt devices supporting the feature and merchants upgrade their hardware to support that growing demand for it.
American Express is already supported through Apple Pay which is compatible with the Apple Watch (when paired to an iPhone).
It remains to be seen if Jawbone will extend this new functionality to other cards such as MasterCard and Visa.
Source : The Wall Street Journal