The two banks ae using tokenisation technology from local supplier Fidesmo to enable Mastercard holders to make contactless payments using watch bracelets made by the Nordic design brands Triwa and Ur & Penn. The plan is to add jewellery and other gadgets to the offering in the near future.

Fidesmo provides a streamlined integration process for manufacturers to add contactless services to their devices and for contactless service providers to distribute their services to devices without incurring any extra hardware costs.

Juha Risikko, head of mobile commerce at Nordea, says: “Fidesmo allows manufacturers to enable their watches to become payment devices in a relatively straight forward way. On Nordea’s side, the process uses similar kinds of tokens as those we have already enabled in Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, Fitbit Pay or Garmin Pay. It’s the same engine that we use to allow our customers to say ‘please tokenise my card and send it to this device’. We are basically enabling our customers to make their watch a payment tool. Of course, the consumer does not have to know that the tokens even exist but rather that they have the possibility of turning their watch into a payment instrument.

"This is only just the beginning, so you can only imagine what sort of payment device you might be using in five years’ time. For the last three years it has been your mobile device, now it’s your smart watch and next it can be any watch or wristband, etc.”