Visa has had a major sponsorship role at past summer Olympics, using the setting to test new technology. This type of "global lab experiment" lets the card brand view the four years between this major athletic event as a gauge for payments advancements.
Visa will use the upcoming Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, to push
wearable technology. Visa and Lotte Department Store, a South Korean retail chain, are selling gloves with embedded Near Field Communication chips and stickers to power contactless payments. The gloves contain a dual interface chip and a contactless antenna that can make payments at about 1,000 Olympic venues and contactless readers in other markets.
In London in 2012, Visa equipped its sponsored athletes and guests with mobile phones and
payWave software to test the early days of contactless payments.
In Brazil last year, Visa athletes and guests wore an NFC Ring with a tokenized general purpose reloadable Visa prepaid card, its first venture with a ring carrying payments capabilities.
The impetus for Visa to introduce an NFC Ring in the
Rio Olympic Games was that year's Super Bowl, where the card brand provided its guests with a chip-enabled wristband for payments and personal identification.
After that experiment with payments wearables, Visa had more time to contemplate how to move away from payments wristbands and into a chip-enabled ring.
NFC Ring, with offices in London and Boulder Creek, Calif., had not previously embedded a payment chip in its product. Previously, NFC Ring was promoting its product as a way for consumers to unlock doors or mobile phones, or transfer information to other people.