The new payment ring presented during the inauguration of the Regional Innovation Center in Dubai, offers athletes advanced payment methods so that they can fully enjoy the Olympic games.
Visa Inc., the exclusive provider of payment solutions at the Olympic and Paralympic games, recently introduced a new innovation to use during the 2016 Olympic games in Rio; the first payment ring linked to a Visa account. The ring was recently presented in Dubai during the official inauguration of the Regional Innovation Center of the enterprise serving the regions of Centrale and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa.
The payment ring will be supplied to all athletes sponsored by Visa in Rio, a group of 45 Olympic hopefuls from around the world who embody the values of tolerance, mutual aid and innovation carried by Visa. The payment ring is based on NFC technology allowing a team of Visa athletes to purchase by simply waving the ring over compatible payment terminals.
The characteristics of this ring makes payment a unique experience. The ring uses an NFC ring design®licensed and contains a chip developed by Gemalto and a compatible antenna with NFC technology, which makes it an amazing accessory for purchasing without contact. Contrary too many payment accessories, the ring doesn’t require a battery or to be charged. The ring is equally waterproof to 50 meters underwater, which allows Olympic athlete and gold medalist Missy Franklin to make a payment by simply touching the ring … without getting out of the pool!
During the inauguration of the Regional innovation center, Visa also presented an advanced prototype of the payment ring Vita which uses tokenization via the Visa Token service, which makes it the first “tokenized” payment ring. Visa’s token technology replaces sensitive information like the 16 digits for account number by a unique digital identifier in order to make payments without disclosing one real identities.
« Visa’s first payment ring will allow our athletes to use an intelligent payment technology to easily purchase, declared Jim McCarthy, executive vice president of strategic innovations and partners at Visa Inc.This ring is the latest ways in which Visa is constantly innovating to realize its objective of universal acceptance of others at the Olympic games and around the world. »
The athletes and fans will equally use their Visa accounts before and during the Rio games in many new ways, either in reserving and planning their journeys through Visa Checkout or purchasing during the Olympic games via mobile phone. These experiences will be proposed for the first time during the Olympic games in Rio and will allow athletes as well as fans to pay by simply sliding, taping or clicking, during their Olympic experience.
« As an Olympic athlete, the ring has an important signification to me,declared Missy Franklin, four time Olympic gold medalist and Visa team member.The ring is a superbe innovation that, I know will please all the athletes in the Rio competitions. It will be wonderful to go from the competition to purchasing without having to carry a wallet or card. »
As the exclusive payment supplier for the Olympic games, Visa is creating and controls all the payment infrastructure and network for all sites including stadiums, media centers, retail outlets, the Olympic village and Olympic superstores. In Rio Visa will install 4000 retail outlets compatible with NFC and able to accept mobile payments and portable devices in all the key Olympic sites, in the US Olympic committee house and the Copacabana megastore.
At a time when the payment industry is turning away from plastic to digital, the new Visa technology offers consumers a simple and safer purchasing way.
About Visa Inc.
Visa is an International company in payment technology that links consumers, enterprises, financial institutions and governments in more than 200 countries and territories to rapid, secure and reliable electronic payment. We operate one of the advanced networks in the world, VisaNet able to handle to more than 65000 messages per second, offering consumers protection against fraud and assuring traders payment guarantee. Visa is not a bank, doesn’t issue cards, and doesn’t give consumer loans and doesn’t fix rates or commissions for consumers. Visa innovations allows, financial institutions, which are its clients to offer a variety of choices to consumers: pay now with a debit card, pay in advance with a prepaid card or pay later thanks to credit. For more information visit: usa.visa.com/about-visa, visacorporate.tumblr.com and @VisaNews.
