Nxt-ID Subsidiary Fit Pay Enables SwatchPay

Fit Pay, a wholly owned subsidiary of Nxt-ID (NASDAQ:NXTD) announced on Friday that its Token Requester Management (TRM) is enabling SwatchPay, a contactless payment feature for watches from Swatch.

As quoted in the press release:

Fit Pay is providing critical tokenization services for the new feature.

“The launch of SwatchPAY! represents a big step towards making contactless and wearable payments more mainstream. Having an iconic brand like Swatch add payments, signals that payment is becoming a must-have feature for most things you wear,” said Michael Orlando, COO of Nxt-ID and president of Fit Pay, Inc. “From a company perspective, adding another top-tier brand to the Fit Pay platform is a very positive development and the culmination of significant effort by our team. It goes a long way toward solidifying our leadership position in this emerging market.”

Fit Pay’s platform enables manufacturers of IoT and wearable devices to add contactless payment capabilities to their products, making it possible for consumers to pay for goods and services at near field communication (NFC)-enabled point-of-sale terminals with a simple tap. The platform uses tokenization, a payment security technology that replaces cardholders’ account information with a unique digital identifier (“payment token”), to transact secure contactless payments. The Fit Pay platform authenticates the accountholder, requests the payment token from the payment network and issuer, provisions the token to an embedded secure element chipset on the device, and manages the lifecycle of the token.

Nxt-ID previously announced that it intends to separate Fit Pay and its payments, authentication and credential management business into an independent company and distribute those shares to Nxt-ID shareholders through the execution of a spin-off, which it believes will qualify as a tax-free distribution. Immediately following the spin-off transaction, Nxt-ID shareholders, who own shares of Nxt-ID on the to-be-announced record date will own shares of both companies. Prior to the record date of the distribution, which will be established by the Board, NXTD shares continue to include shareholder rights to any pro-rata dividend that may result from the spin-off. The new company, PartX, Inc., will include the assets acquired in the May 2017 business combination with Fit Pay, Inc. as well as the payment, authentication and credential management assets previously by Nxt-ID. It is applying for listing on NASDAQ.

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