U.S. business travelers soon will be able to use their
fitness smartwatches not only to track their steps as they race to their gates but
also to pay for the coffee that fuels their sprints. American Express, MasterCard
and Visa have enabled corporate card use for the Fitbit Ionic smartwatch, coming
in October, and MasterCard and Visa also integrated with Garmin's Vivoactive 3 smartwatch.
If the bank that issues a corporate card enables it on these
devices and the corporate travel program OKs it, travelers then can
connect their corporate cards through Fitbit's and Garmin's apps. As for mobile
wallets and other smartwatches, the user taps or waves the watch at a near-field
communication-enabled terminal to pay.
Card networks began enabling mobile wallet use for corporate
cards in 2015, but corporates have been slow to allow their travelers to use
them. A low number of participating merchants and card issuers has proved low
motivation, and safety concerns worry the corporates. Mobile wallet providers
and card networks, however, claim the payment method is safer because it uses
tokenization, which replaces a cardholders' account number with a token account
number, and because it can be paired with biometric authentication, such as
fingerprint readers.
Considering
Fitbit already partners with corporate clients—Barclays, BP, Bank of America,
IBM, Kimberly-Clark, Target and Time Warner, according to Fast Company—to
develop internal wellness programs and offer discounts for the device, uptake for
fitness smartwatches could be faster.