A new piece of wearable tech is hitting the High Street this Christmas in the form of a contactless payment glove from Barclaycard.

The company said it had designed the novel piece of kit in response to demand for a wearable payment item that made paying quicker and easier when customers were laden with shopping bags.

In a survey by Barclaycard, which quizzed 2,000 people on their Christmas shopping behaviour, “gloves you could pay with” were voted the most popular wearable item that consumers would like to see created, followed by rings in second place and bracelets in third.

Barclaycard has developed a small number of ‘pay glove’ prototypes which will be trialled across some of the UK’s 300,000 contactless locations during the busy Christmas shopping period.

The gloves – which are also touchscreen-enabled so shoppers can use their mobile phones – are embedded with a bPay contactless chip that can be linked to a credit or debit card, and used to pay for transactions of up to £20. In the same way consumers use a contactless card, the gloves work when tapped on a contactless terminal and payment is processed in an instant.

Mike Saunders, managing director of digital consumer payments at Barclaycard, said: “At some point most of us have experienced the stress of holding bags full of shopping while trying to find a spare hand to get our card out of our purse or wallet to pay. So when people told us that being able to pay with gloves would take some of the stress out of their Christmas shopping, we wanted to respond positively to shoppers’ demand.

“The ‘pay gloves’ we’re trialling are designed to let shoppers ‘tap, pay and go’ even when their hands are full of shopping. If the prototype is popular, these handy winter warmers could be bringing some festive cheer to bag-laden shoppers by Christmas 2015!”

This latest move builds on Barclaycard’s foray into wearable tech, which also saw the launch of the bPay wristband this summer.

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