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TECH TREND Thursday: KAIROS’ Hybrid Pay Play

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April 2015


With the introduction of smart watches, the tech world and the watch world have fused. Or have they clashed? To see how the two sectors are getting along, every Thursday we keep you up to date with tech trends from the watch world. Today we cover start-up brand Kairos Watches.

When start-up Kairos made public its ambitions to create the world’s first mechanical smart watch hybrid, the watch community was skeptical to say the least. The idea was to produce a watch that features a mechanical movement (Swiss or Japanese) with an integrated and transparent OLED screen in the glass, allowing for smartwatch functionality. The announcement was considered too good to be true. The prospect was so ambitions - from an unknown brand, no less - that some thought it would never exist in the first place.

TECH TREND Thursday: KAIROS' Hybrid Pay Play

Kairos Model SSW158

How wrong they were. By May 2015, the company has promised that it will begin fulfilling its orders. Not only has Kairos started to deliver on their past promise, but now they are making a new one: to revolutionize mobile payment services.

This week, the brand announced a collaboration with technology and financial services provider Wirecard AG. Why, you might ask? Because Kairos wants to use Wirecard’s Payments Software Development Kit to make contactless payment transactions using its watches.

The payment function is conceived to operate through Kairos’ T-Band, a smart watch band. The device/watchband also allows the wearer to use any watch they want, because smartwatch components are integrated into the band itself.

TECH TREND Thursday: KAIROS' Hybrid Pay Play

Kairos T-Band mobile payment concept

“Kairos Watches believes that the future of payments is wearable, which is why we chose to partner with Wirecard, one of the world’s most innovative payment companies,” said Sam Yang, Founder and Managing Director of Kairos Watches.

The new concept will surely add to our convenience, my making and tracking payment effortlessly. The immediate question, of course, is that of security. But something tells me Kairos will manage to sort that out, too. Because as we have seen, those who have doubted Kairos before have been proven wrong shortly thereafter. (VJ)