Portfolio: Payment Wristbands
This was a project that I (and a greater team) worked on whilst at PayPal.
We built a payment wristband solution - where each wristband had an embedded Visa EMV chip within a defined BIN range. The solution was tested at the Splendour in the Grass music festival. Where participating consumers would (i) on-board by tapping their wristband and connecting it to their PayPal account (I built the on-boarding app); and then (ii) consummating purchase of drinks at the bar by tapping their wristband against a PayPal Here card terminal device.
We modified the PayPal switch (upstream of the PayPal Here device) so that it detected taps from within the pre-defined BIN range and routed them to an application that I and a colleague had written that attempted to charge the PayPal account of the consumer and responded back to the switch and down to the terminal if it had worked or not.
Ultimately the project was successful at the festival, but shortly after PayPal terminated ongoing investment into their hardware strategy (incl. PayPal Here) and any further work on this and other hardware projects were abandoned.