Could contactless fingernails be the next payments revolution?
Would you get your bank card installed on your finger?
That’s what I did two weeks ago, and it’s changed the way I think about payments.
The device -- a small NFC chip -- was attached to the back of my thumb nail and painted over with nail polish in a process that took little more than ten minutes.
I was able to connect it up to my bank account using an app on my phone. Since then, I’ve been able to use it to pay for whatever I like, whether it’s touching in and out at the tube ticket gates, hopping on a bus, buying a coffee or doing my grocery shopping.
Paying for stuff now feels effortless: I just press down my thumb and I’m done. Having to reach into my pocket for my wallet and fiddle around to find the right card, or even getting out the digital payments wallet on my phone now feels like a faff by comparison.
The device is manufactured by a Swiss firm called Smart Chip, while the payments infrastructure has been developed by a British fintech firm called Digiseq. The hope is that the chip -- which has yet to be released to the general public -- will become widely available at nail salons so that customers (mostly women) can get one installed as part of a manicure.
Will it ever catch on? There was a huge shift away from using chip & pin when contactless cards were introduced -- and making payments with phones or smart devices like watches has become pretty commonplace. The same thing could happen again here.
But there’s just one problem with my new contactless thumb: in a few weeks’ time the chip is going to grow all the way off my nail, at which point I would have to get a new one installed. Digiseq say that regular users would expect to have to get the chip replaced about every six to eight weeks. That’s quite a big ask for some folk who may be on the fence about getting one -- and depending on the installation price, it could be quite a high cost too.
