Chip implanted in body for payments – there are banks interested

By October, Meow-Ludo Meow Meow hopes to leave his wallet at home — maybe forever. The near field communication (NFC) chip he has implanted in the back of his thumb could soon let him make contactless payments and potentially catch public transport.

The chip, which feels like a tiny, hard cylinder to the touch, was implanted in April at a piercing studio in Sydney. It wasn’t too painful, he told Mashable Australia, and his thumb was tender for only a short time after.

„If you think about it like a cat or dog microchip, it’s quite quick and quite painless,” he said.

When Meow first got the chip, he had no idea what he wanted to do with it. However, he quickly realised that it had two main capabilities: authentication and activation.

„The two biggest areas the chip could enable are authentication — I have a little bit of memory inside my thumb that can identify me uniquely — and also, [to] activate things,” he explained.

The chip can only perform small tasks for the moment, but Meow has grander plans.

Currently, if he holds his thumb to the NFC reader on the back of his smartphone, it can detect the business card the chip is carrying. He can also reprogram the chip using a basic app. While we were together, he programmed it to disclose our location on Google Maps.

„It’s basically a little piece of memory that can do some fun stuff,” he said.

Working with with technologists Nathan Waters and Phill Ogden, Meow is working on a project to facilitate financial transactions through the chip with just a tap of his thumb on a store’s contactless payments reader. Think of it as a fintech startup merged with a biohacking experiment.

By October, the team is hoping to make the implant work with the Commonwealth Bank’s EFTPOS tablet, Albert, which is a common contactless payment system used in retail stores. To allow transactions to go through they’ll need to build a new app for Albert.

They’re also going to experiment with ways to integrate the chip with Opal, Sydney’s electronic public transport card.

For Meow, the end goal is to have the implant work with PayPass — MasterCard’s contactless payments system. This would allow Meow to use his thumb to pay at most retail stores across Australia, as PayPass is widely accepted.

PayPass requires more memory, however — Meow’s NFC chip can hold only 868 bytes. He’d need to put a chip with larger capacity in another finger. „I’ll probably put it in the other thumb, and keep this one for hacking,” he said.

Source: mashable.com