Spending gets under your skin

At the 2016 Rio Olympics, Visa gave athletes rings for their fingers that would let them buy something just by waving a hand at it. Now the company is making the technology smaller and, perhaps someday, ubiquitous. 

Visa’s contactless credit card has been reduced to the size of a small sticker you can wear on your hand – perhaps the next step on the way to under-skin implants. You would simply tap your sticker (or skin) against an object, or its image on a touchscreen, to buy it. 

This would relieve security concerns of having online retailers storing your personal information and credit card numbers, tempting hackers. But Visa has yet to demonstrate ways to definitively confirm purchases so you don’t, for example, buy a shirt in a store just because you picked it up. 

TRENDPOST: Retailers, advertisers and credit providers will continue to use advances in technology to make it easier for us to spend money and accumulate debt. Impulse purchases will be an even greater temptation. Consumers’ ability to identify and resist merchants’ manipulations will become an even more important survival skill.