Contactless gloves a handy new way to pay for Christmas shopping

Barclaycard designs “contactless payment gloves” as shoppers vote gloves the most desired wearable payment item. Prototypes to be trialled during the busy Christmas rush as a test-and-learn exercise in several UK stores. Gloves expected to prove popular with the 74 per cent of shoppers who rated queuing as their biggest Christmas shopping pet hate.

Barclaycard has taken an innovative approach to the wearable payments market with the trial of ‘tap and pay’ woollen gloves that allow people to pay contactlessly for their Christmas shopping. Barclaycard has developed a small number of ‘pay-glove’ prototypes which are being trialled across some of the UK’s 300,000 contactless locations during the busy Christmas shopping period, according to a press release.

In a survey* by Barclaycard, which quizzed 2000 people on their Christmas shopping behaviour, “gloves you could pay with” were voted the most popular wearable item consumers would like to see created, followed by rings in second place and bracelets in third. The cosy woollen gloves, which are also touchscreen-enabled so shoppers can use their mobile phones while on the move, act like your credit or debit card and can be used to make quick and easy contactless payments.

The Barclaycard gloves are embedded with a bPay contactless chip that can be linked to a credit or debit card and used to pay for transactions of up to £20. In the same way consumers use a contactless card, the gloves work when tapped on a contactless terminal and payment is processed in an instant.

This fashionable make-over for Barclaycard’s payment devices couldn’t have come at a better time with UK consumers predicted to spend £2 billion through contactless this year as they increasingly choose it over cash.

Mike Saunders, managing director of Digital Consumer Payments at Barclaycard says: “When people told us that being able to pay with gloves would take some of the stress out of their Christmas shopping, we wanted to respond positively to shoppers’ demand. The ‘pay gloves’ we’re trialling are designed to let shoppers ‘tap, pay and go’ even when their hands are full of shopping. If the prototype is popular, these handy winter warmers could be bringing some festive cheer to bag-laden shoppers by Christmas 2015.”

There are now 45 million contactless cards in circulation in the UK and a quarter of all plastic new cards are contactless-enabled – which means that customers can simply touch their cards on contactless-enabled terminals to make faster secure payments.

[*] Results of a survey commissioned for Barclaycard by One Poll, between 4th and 8th December 2014, amongst 2000 respondents.