Discover partners with Garmin for smartwatch payments

Dive Brief:

Discover and Garmin International have teamed up to allow Discover cardholders to pay for products and services through the Garmin Pay contactless payment platform available on many Garmin smartwatches, according to a Discover press release.
Garmin Pay is enabled by FitPay, and is available on several Garmin smartwatches, including the vívoactive 3 series, the Forerunner 645, Forerunner 645 Music and fēnix 5 Plus series, the D2 Delta aviator watch series and Garmin’s GPS running watches.
Discover cardmembers can add their card to the Garmin virtual wallet by using the Garmin Connect Mobile App, and after doing so can use it as a payment method at any merchant location that accepts both Discover and contactless Near Field Communication (NFC) payment methods.

Dive Insight:

There has been a lot of activity on the contactless payments front lately. Recent evidence suggests more retailers will be accepting contactless forms of payment from many more devices and cards.

Just last week, Target became one of the last remaining large retail chains to announce it would accept in-store contactless payment through a variety of wallet apps. Late last year, CVS gave in after its long self-imposed abstinence from accepting NFC-based contactless payments by announcing it would accept Apple Pay.

Meanwhile, Visa teamed up last fall with Hudson Yards to provide contactless payment support for retailer stores and other merchants at the massive new real estate development. In the smartwatch world, Kate Spade just this month announced a new one enabled with NFC payment capability.

Garmin Pay has been around for a couple of years, and its virtual wallet already supported payment via Visa and Mastercard. It may look like Discover is late to this particular party, but in truth contactless payments are just starting to take off, at least in the U.S. Also, while an increasing number of smartwatch models are starting to support NFC-based contactless payments, it is still relatively early in the evolution of the smartwatch market as well.