Swatch NFC Payments Should Become Standard Watch Feature

We already know that Swatch’s hifalutin battery big-talk was all bluster, what with its “smartwatch” being this thing.

But, as International Business Times reports (and I extrapolate), there might — and should — be more to the strategy for the Swiss conglomerate going forward. Here’s how IBT’s Mike Brown summarizes Swatch’s potential:

But Swatch has a trick up its sleeve that may tempt users to ditch their Apple device for the Bellamy. The company says the Bellamy payments use no energy whatsoever — just because the Bellamy can handle payments, doesn’t mean the battery life will suffer as a result. Swatch promises the device will have “the usual battery life of a Swatch,” two to three years. On the other hand, the Apple Watch is rated as having up to 18 hours battery life.

While the Apple Watch battery issue is mostly moot, the real point here is that, by Swatch’s reckoning, an NFC payment platform requires no significant power draw from a given watch’s standard battery capacity. That means that, if this is the only “smart” feature onboard, it makes a lot of sense to make it a standard feature across the board. That means that, though Swatch’s technology and Visa partnership is currently limited to the Bellamy model, it could conceivably become as common to a Swatch watch as the hour and minute hands of its analog dial.

As an overarching strategy, this might actually be a decent strategy for Swatch to address one compelling aspect of the Apple Watch in an inexpensive and forward-thinking way. Plus, with NFC, Swatch needn’t be limited to payments. Perhaps the function of the chip could be user-defined, letting customers trade between credit cards and keyless entry and whatever else an ambitious third party can come up with re: these trigger dongles. With NFC, the sky (or, at least, the near field) is the limit, and this could be Swatch’s ticket to staying digitally relevant without actually dumping millions of dollars into wasted smartwatch R&D.

Maybe Swatch isn’t so stupid after all.