Global trendsApril 11, 2016September 19, 2019

Also Fintech

Fintech became so big are for the last three years – several streams like price-comparison, market-place for gift-cards, experiments with NFC-payments in jewelry and watches, cards, which try to replace your cards, started to exit, but still not so disruptive. But the future will show their opportunities.

Read our full research“Money of the Future”. Download PDF (20MB)

Boom of price-comparison sites in Asia

Price-comparison services more adtech right now, than fintech – but in the future, when they will add big data and online-scoring upgrade to their leads, it will be great business!

The vast majority of people in India still rely on brick-and-mortar offices. Less than one percent of overall sales of financial products in India are transacted online, but more people will turn to online-platforms as Internet penetration increases because they can do their own research before deciding on a loan, credit card, or investment vehicle instead of listening to a sales pitch. In July Indian BankBazaar, a startup that lets consumers compare financial products online, scored a $60 million Series C led by Amazon, with participation from Fidelity Growth Partners, Mousse Partners, and returning investors Sequoia Capital and Walden International. The platform aggregates information about online loans, credit cards, and fixed deposits from 23 financial institutions, which users can research and then apply for using its site or Android and iOS apps. BankBazaar says it gets four million unique visitors each month.

For Amazon, its investment represents a chance to take a larger stake in the personal finance market. Online payments remain a pain point for many Indian consumers who want to shop online because credit card penetration is still very low. Snapdeal, one of Amazon’s main competitors in India, made a similar move in April when it bought credit card and loan marketplace RupeePower.com, which will help it provide loans to consumers. Amazon and BankBazaar said that there are “synergies” between them that will be “leveraged for consumer benefit in the coming years,” but did not specify exactly what those collaborations will be. The company claims that online applications for personal, home, and auto loans are growing by 90 percent, compared to just 15 percent growth offline.

Hyderabad-based product discovery and price comparison platform, MySmartPrice, has recorded more than 106 Mn unique users visiting the site in 2015. In August 2014, the company had recorded 15 Mn monthly visitors with about 9 million unique users. Out of all the categories listed on the platform, it was seen that mobile phones were the top selling category followed by computer, fashion and electronics. This year, Mysmartprice reported that the company generated a GMV of $140 Mn with more than 2.3 Mn orders placed. The company had raised $10 Mn in Series B round of funding from Accel Partners and Helion Venture Partners, in July 2015, and planned to reach reach a Gross merchandise value (GMV) of $1 Bn.

BankBazaar’s direct competitor, Hong Kong-based financial comparison site CompareAsiaGroup announced it raised US$40 million in series A funding led by Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, Jardine Pacific, Nova Founders Capital, ACE & Company, and Route 66 Ventures. Zynga founder Mark Pincus, former Facebook and MySpace COO Owen Van Natta, and others also participated in the round. Under the CompareAsiaGroup umbrella are several brands each localized for their respective markets: MoneyHero in Hong Kong and Vietnam, CompareHero in Malaysia, Money101 in Taiwan, MoneyGuru in Thailand, SingSaver in Singapore, MoneyMax in the Philippines, and HaloMoney in Indonesia.

The site aggregates more than 1,500 financial products including credit cards, loans, health insurance, and car insurance. The latest funding round will go toward expanding those offerings to more categories, including investment products and life insurance, and into marketing. “We want to make sure in the next 12 months that every housewife will know our brand,” says Gerald Eder, founder and managing director. The service is free to consumers, while the more than 60 banks and insurance companies that list their products pay a commission in return for expanding their marketing reach.

While CompareAsiaGroup claims to be the leading financial site in Asia, it’s a highly competitive market. There are at least seven rival sites in Indonesia alone, for example. But Eder saays being a regional company as opposed to a country-specific one allows CompareAsiaGroup “to reap tremendous benefits in economies of scale.”

One of Indonesian competitors – Cermati, – announced that it has closed a seed funding round of an undisclosed amount led by local VC firm East Ventures and followed by Japan-based Beenos Plaza. Cermati claims consumer lending is a US$120 billion business in Indonesia. As Indonesians are getting wealthier and entering the consuming middle class, it’s likely they will more often spring for financial products. Cermati will square off against already well-established names like CekAja, HaloMoney, AturDuit, and more.

According to a recent McKinsey study, Indonesia’s ownership of financial products is lower at 2.3 products per capita. This is low when compared to countries like Thailand at 2.5, Malaysia at 5.4 and Singapore at 7.7.

New unicorn on the border between ecommerce and fintech

Old ideas keep getting new life, thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones. And a company called Raise, which runs an online marketplace for gift cards, announced a giant $56 million investment led by NEA, just two months after announcing a separate $18 million round of funding. CEO George Bousis told that the new investment values the two-year-old company at “just shy of a billion” dollars. He declined to provide an exact figure.

A billion-dollar valuation for a gift card company? To explain why that’s not batshit crazy, NEA General Partner Tony Florence said the sleepy gift card market has moved to digital in a big way only in the last few years. Moreover, Raise is seeing a ton of usage on mobile devices, with shoppers buying discounted digital gift cards on their phones while in the store to make an immediate purchase. “We think mobile usage here is the killer app for the company,” he said.

Raise passed $10 million in monthly gross card sales several months ago and has been growing more than 10 percent a month since then. The company takes a 15 percent cut when someone sells a gift card or store credit on their site. That number may sound steep, but Raise’s numbers prove that people who have received gift cards as gifts or who don’t want store credit as a refund will bite the bullet.

Around 94 percent of the gift cards sold are passed on to the buyer in digital form with identification codes and a barcode for in-store scanning. That means Raise doesn’t have to store any inventory. It also means Raise only has to provide pre-paid postage to sellers in the rare cases where the physical card cannot be rendered in digital form.

The additional funding, which brings the company’s total outside investment to $81 million, comes after a period of rapid growth following the release of Raise’s mobile application. Also participating in the round were prior investors Bessemer Venture Partners, the Pritzker Organization, Listen Ventures and several individual angels.

Raise reported hundreds of thousands of customers had either bought or sold cards from around 3,000 brands via the site to date. In addition, in 2014, the company sold over a million gift cards, and between November and the end of the year, Raise grew over 50% in revenue and other metrics. And user growth quadrupled.

Longer-term, Raise is working to develop services for retailers that will allow it to tap into the aggregate, anonymized data provided by shoppers. As for Bousis, he believes Raise’s growth can be attributed to many factors, one of which is timing. The app arrived as mobile payments have really begun to take off, and the use of digital gift cards is on the rise, too.

Loyalty and marketing apps, which try to help customers with reward-programs are very close to the market of gift-cards. FreeCharge (an Indian mobile service that gives users coupons and other rewards from merchants when they pay their utility bills, television, phone, and etc.) has raised an $80M series C round from Valiant Capital Management and Tybourne Capital Management, as well as returning investors Sequoia Capital, RuNet (Russia) and Sofina. In September 2014 the service raised $33М in series B, and the total raised so far amounts to $115М. The service has a customer base of more than 20M and its mobile app was downloaded 10M times.

Lootsie, one of several startups that allow developers to add reward programs to their games and other apps, announced that it has raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Its competition includes companies like Kiip. The concept behind Receipt Hog (Android, iOS) is simple. You scan your receipts—from any store—into the app, and the info is used anonymously for research marketing purposes. For doing so, you earn virtual coins that can be exchanged for PayPal cash or Amazon gift cards. As a bonus, all your receipts get digitized inside the app so you always have them close at hand if you need them.

Cards which try to replace your cards

First there was Coin, then there was Plastc: two companies promising the smart credit card of the future—one card that could store all of your cards. The companies announced their products with gusto. They took customer cash and preorders, Kickstarter-style. Then, Coin began apologizing for delay after delay, and it finally launched in April 2015. Plastc never technically delayed, but released in summer of 2015. In the meantime, a slew of competitors have popped up asking the crowd to pay their bills before they even debut anything. Call it Kickstarter Syndrome. Lots of product videos. Not so many actual products.

The smart credit card built by the Michigan-based startup Stratos and designed by Herbst Produkt, announced in April 2015. CEO Thiago Olson has positioned Stratos to be competitive among peers, and that all came down to patience. Whereas other startups rush to be the first “disruptor” to announce a product, Stratos adopted a classic design and development process. The company raised $7 million in venture capital, hired 50 people, polled another 1,200 people, honed its technologies, polished the user experience, and worked with manufacturers to ensure everything could be produced reliably at scale.

Olson, 25, speaks with the articulate polish of any startup CEO, but by background, he is more of a scientist than an entrepreneur. He was a wunderkind who built a nuclear fusion reactor in his basement at age 17. He studied electrical engineering and plasma physics at Vanderbilt and Princeton, worked in multiple U.S. national laboratories and a particle accelerator in Switzerland, and joined the Department of Defense where he shifted from R&D to become, as he describes it, a “mini VC” or venture capitalist, giving out research grants. Somewhere along the line, he had a planet named after him, and he caught the entrepreneurial bug, founding Stratos in 2012 in his home state of Michigan.

The card—like all of its competitors—is a remarkably complex piece of hardware. Inside a body that’s as thin as a stock credit card, it squeezes in two magnets that dynamically program its magnetic strip to mimic any card you possess (a redundancy its competitors lack, which Stratos believes makes its card swipe more reliable in the field), a battery (which lasts up to two years), an accelerometer (that enables users to tap their card a few times to pull up information about it on their phone), a Bluetooth transmitter (to talk to the phone), three hard buttons (to quickly select credit cards when your phone isn’t around), and LED lights (to show which card you’ve selected).

With usable hardware, Stratos began stress-testing—bending the card thousands of times, testing whether it was waterproof, and ensuring it worked on all sorts of swipeable terminals. Olson’s team also spent years considering use-case scenarios. Will it work at ATMs? Yes. What happens when the card’s battery runs out? There’s an early warning, and a new card is automatically shipped your way when the old one is low. What happens if you pay at a restaurant and your waiter hits a button, changing the card? The system is designed so the waiter would actually have to intentionally double tap it, and you’d receive a text notification if the card changed.

Users subscribe to Stratos for $95 a year. With Coin and Plastc, you buy the card outright. Olson believes his approach will reconcile nervousness with early adoption, because whenever the company releases a new, better card, users will receive it as a replacement. Stratos is working on its second-generation product, which will add the micro radio transmitter needed for full support of the European-popular Chip and PIN credit cards, as well as an onboard thumbprint ID lock to keep your card more secure. There’s a logic at play here: Stratos doesn’t need to maintain legacy hardware if everyone is on the company’s latest card. “The payments landscape is changing rapidly, Olson says. “We don’t necessarily want you on our last-gen card three years from now.”

The Stratos is an early player in a new category of devices. It’s a sort of universal credit card that aims to consolidate all the plastic cards in your wallet. To use a certain credit card, the owner simply taps one of the hidden buttons or selects one on the mobile app. When it works, it’s magic. When it doesn’t, it’s just another card to carry. The Stratos failed to work about 5 percent of the time. And that’s a problem. Payment devices like Stratos, Apple Pay and Coin need to work every time. One failed interaction will cast doubt in the user’s mind. It was hard to predict when a transaction would fail, too. It worked at Starbucks. Home Depot and 7-Eleven accepted it. Chase ATMs worked fine, but a generic ATM at a bodega failed to read it. A couple of waiters returned it, annoyed that “I gave them a business card instead of a credit card”.

The Michigan-based company launched their device in April and spent the last three years building the product. Unlike Coin, a similar universal credit card, the Stratos doesn’t look nor feel electronic. The casing is seamless and smooth. Quickly tap the card on a hard surface (like a phone, hand or countertop) and the card jumps to life, with lights flashing next to hidden buttons. The user has a few seconds to select a loaded credit card. If this action is done on a connected phone, a clever lockscreen menu lets the owner select even more plastic cards.

The Stratos can only hold three credit cards, but the app can hold an unlimited amount. Owners select one of the three pre-loaded cards using three buttons on the Stratos. Compared to the Coin or upcoming Plastc, this seems like a major limitation as those devices store an unlimited number of cards, but I never found this to be an issue. I loaded my debit card and two loyalty cards onto my Stratos and stored several rarely used cards on the app. It only takes a few moments to swap the cards.

The company is actually in active talks with retailers to allow customers to instantly add a loyality card. The Stratos Card’s backend was built with this in mind. The company’s founders envisions a platform like iTunes but for credit cards. If you want to add, say, a Nordstrem’s loyality card, an owner will be able to instantly load it onto their Stratos Card. The logical endpoint is that consumers might be able to apply for a credit card and instantly have access through the Stratos Card.

Stratos isn’t the only device attempting to lighten our credit card load. Coin is a similar device, sporting a tiny e-ink screen that addresses some of the inherent problems with the screen-less Stratos. But Coin isn’t perfect either. The Coin’s build quality is shoddy compared to Stratos. Like the Stratos, Coin isn’t accepted everywhere. Apple Pay has acceptance issues, too, which begs the question if the world is ready to change how consumers pay for goods.

Carrying multiple plastic cards is not the scourge of the world but the experience can be improved. Stratos could be the company to do it, too. The company has built an amazing product that, with a bit of work, could be a game changer. But for now weeks after its launch, the Stratos Card is simply not perfect to fully replace your plastic cards.
So far Stratos has raised $7 million in funding from Midwest and West Coast investors. San Francisco-based Toba Capital led the company’s latest round with Western Technology Investment, Hyde Park Venture Partners, and Michigan-based Resonant Venture Partners also participating.

Universal credit cards are hitting the market just as mobile carriers and phone makers are rolling out usable mobile wallets. Apple has found a good amount of success with Apple Pay and Google and Samsung are seriously upgrading their offerings. Consumers will soon have a bevy of options available, which might cloud the space with confusion. But physical credit cards are not something that will quickly disappear and perhaps companies like Stratos, Coin and Plastc can get while the getting’s good.

The Coin has delayed for so long that you might have forgotten that you ordered one. In November of 2013, the YC-backed company blew past its $50,000 pre-order goal in forty minutes, but despite a promise of summer 2014 shipping, the company has yet to ship a product that wasn’t in beta. Until April 2015. After a six-month beta program, Coin was finally ready to ship a finished product to the 350,000 people who have pre-ordered in the first two months of pre-order.

After signing into the Coin app with the same credentials used to order the Coin, users are asked to create a unique six-digit tap code. It uses a combination of long taps and short taps, of your choosing, to ensure no one can get into the Coin app or the Coin itself unless they know the code, or have control of the user’s smartphone.

Once the app is set up, users can pair their Coin and add new cards by manually entering information, swiping the card through an included card reader that goes into the headphone jack of the phone, or by taking a picture of the card as you would with Apple Pay.

The Coin remains locked when not in use. As soon as you’re ready to make a transaction, a single tap on the Coin’s solitary button will wake the device, do a quick search for your specific smartphone, and after a couple of seconds it will unlock. If your phone is turned off, on Airplane mode, or otherwise unavailable, you can unlock the Coin by entering the same six-digit Morse-style pin code that you will use each time you access the Coin app. The Coin stays alive for seven minutes once it’s unlocked (so that a waiter can have the time to swipe), and then automatically locks and goes to sleep. It also remembers its last-known location and alerts the user as soon as it thinks that the smartphone has been separated from the Coin.

Users can save up to eight cards on the Coin at a single time, and they can re-sync different cards stored within the app as long as they’re within reach of their smartphone. The team is already working on an EMV product. The Coin would try to make the shift as seamless as possible for backers, but that it’s too early to know what the exact deal or trade-in process will be.

Plastc is a debit/credit card that can hold all of your different card information whether it be a debit card, credit card(s), gift cards, loyalty cards, or membership cards. Visa, MasterCard, and American Express cards can be saved, but unfortunately, Discover cards cannot. They may have not wanted to jump on board with this cool idea.

Plastc uses an e-ink touchscreen display to swipe through the card information (up to 20 cards) that have been stored in Plastc. More awesome features that the card has is that it can be used everywhere. It has a magnetic strip and a bar code, which will show up on the display. A PIN is on the card, which “acts as the first line of security,” and proximity alerts that tells you when you’re are away from the card. Another part of the security feature is that remote security will wipe the card automatically if your card is lost or stolen. If you get it back, simply re-sync Plastc and all the card information will return. Your picture along with signature will show up on Plastc for verification so there’s no need to take out your drivers licence. Plastc works with the Plastc companion application so you’ll be able to add new cards or change them out at any time. Even your spending shows up too. NFC is included for those of you who use tap to pay like I do.

Here’s a roundup of some of the most popular and promising multi-account cards:

Stratos

Cost: $95 for a yearly membership, or $145 for two years.
Stratos is one of several multi-account cards that charges users a yearly fee, which covers an annual upgrade. Some other companies allow consumers to pay an upfront fee, then decide whether they want to buy updated hardware, much like wireless phone carriers.
Number of cards device can store: The Stratos app can store an unlimited number of cards, but users can load only three cards onto the device at a time. Paying with a card not loaded onto the device requires opening the app on a mobile phone and selecting a new card to add to the rotation. For most people, immediate access to three cards is probably enough. But other devices allow users to load many more.
Battery life: Stratos does not come with a charger, though the company says the battery lasts an estimated two years. When your card gets low on juice, Stratos detects the battery level and sends you a replacement at no extra charge.
Payment compatibility: Stratos does not currently work with standard EMV-chip contact readers or NFC (near-field communication) readers.

Coin 2.0

Cost: $99 upfront, no annual fee. The company says it will replace Coin 1.0 magstripe-only units with NFC-capable Coin 2.0 free of charge.
Number of cards device can store: The Coin app can store an unlimited number of cards and sync up to eight to the device.
Battery life: The card’s battery cannot be recharged, but the company estimates it will last around two years, after which the device must be replaced.
Payment compatibility: Coin 2.0 integrates NFC technology — a feature notably missing from several other multi-account cards — which allows users to pay with EMV cards via contactless terminals such as those used with Apple Pay. However, Coin 2.0 will not work with EMV-chip contact readers that require you to insert your card. Coin’s magstripe transmits card information, but not the cardholder’s name. As a result, merchant terminals that require a card to transmit both when swiped won’t be compatible with Coin.

Swyp

Cost: $99, no annual fee.
Number of cards device can store: Like most other smart cards, Swyp’s app can store an unlimited number of cards. The Swyp device itself can hold a whopping 25 cards, more than any other multi-account card in our roundup. Though most users will probably stretch to fill their Swyp with that many cards, it’s certainly better to have more options than not enough.
Battery life: Swyp’s battery does come with a charger, though the company claims that with normal use, the card should last around a year on a single charge.
Payment compatibility: Swyp has a magstripe and an EMV chip, but doesn’t come with NFC technology, though the company has plans to add it. Barcodes, such as those found on many loyalty cards, can be added and used through the app.

Plastc

Cost: The Plastc device, which won’t be released until April, will sell for $180; that will include an 18-month subscription. Ongoing service will be available for $50 a year.
Number of cards device can store: The Plastc Wallet app can store an unlimited number of cards. The device itself can hold an impressive 20 debit, credit, loyalty or gift cards for access at any time.
Battery life: Plastc’s battery is said to last an estimated 30 days, but the card will come with a charger.
Payment compatibility: Plastc is the only card in our review that promises to incorporate magnetic stripe, NFC and chip-and-PIN in a single device. It may be among the most versatile multi-account cards when it’s released.
Beyond plastic: different companies experiment with rings, watches as new ways to pay

The chief executive of Swatch Group, the world’s best-selling watchmaker, said that the company doesn’t plan to make a “mini mobile phone on your wrist”. Nick Hayek said Swatch’s Touch range would focus on “integrating smart functions into a watch.” Hayek had previously said that Swatch might collaborate with technology companies “in some areas”. Instead of creating an all-in-one device, the company will focus on adding individual features into different models. The first will see near-field-communication (NFC) chips added to its watches, allowing wearers to make payments with a wrist swipe.

Swatch has partnered with China UnionPay, a Chinese credit card association, for touch payments in China, and Reuters has reported a deal with Visa is being worked on for the rest of the world. An unnamed Swiss bank is also involved.
Instead of building a suite of apps to accompany its watches, Swatch will leave them open for its customers to configure. “Whatever usage you want, you ask some creative people to create some apps and then our chip has different layers that you can program yourself — we give it to you,” he said. “You buy your Swatch, the one you like, and then you configure it.” The first Swatch watches with NFC priced at around £90.

Paying with plastic is so last season. In recent months, credit card companies such as MasterCard and Visa have introduced alternative methods of paying for goods and services — an innovative technology trend that is only expected to intensify in 2016. “The premise is that every connected device is a payment device and every connected device is a marketing vehicle for us to reach the consumer,” explained Raja Rajamannar, CMO at Purchase, N.Y.-based MasterCard. STB Venture Capital, the venture firm of savings bank Sberbank, along with other investors invested $6.5M in Canadian Mobeewave, which turns any smartphone with NFC technology into a payment terminal.

In 2016 MasterCard will begin rolling out a series of products, including a key fob, dress and ring, that can function as credit cards. The company has partnered with General Motors, fashion designer Adam Selman and wearable tech company Ringly on the effort. Similarly, Visa is working on a series of initiatives such as a Swatch watch that can make payments, which will roll out beginning in Switzerland next year. The Foster City, Calif.-based company, which has issued about 2.9 million global credit cards, is also in talks with 14 different automobile manufacturers about how to commercialize a car system that pays for goods, like meals at a restaurant, so consumers don’t even need to leave their vehicle. All of these initiatives are partnerships with other product-making companies, while the credit card issuers simply provide the technology. Visa developed its strategic partnership program three years ago.

Many of these new payment initiatives could help to lure in much-desired millennials, a generation that has usually shunned traditional methods of finance. Jeff Fromm, president of millennial-focused agency FutureCast, said that it’s only logical companies like Visa and MasterCard are experimenting with technology and improving the payment process for consumers since millennials are known as influencing older generations.

If pulling out your wallet or tapping your phone on a reader to pay for your daily latte is just too much, you’re about to have another option (almost literally) at your fingertips. The smart jewelry company Ringly announces a partnership with MasterCard that will allow you to pay for items with the tap of a ring. Ringly founder and CEO Christina d’Avignon says that the partnership is not exclusive, and the company is actively working with other vendors to make it easy for customers to pay for their purchases using other credit cards as well. It will work much like other mobile payment systems: Users will upload their credit cards to their Ringly app, which will allow them to to pay by tapping their ring on a smart payment terminal.

“People will be able to use their rings anywhere that they can currently pay with Apple Pay or with a chip card,” d’Avignon says. “This is where payment infrastructure is going. People will soon not have to carry their credit cards around at all.” The rings, which have been sold at Ringly.com and other online retailers since January 2015, pair with phones and are controlled using an iPhone or Android app. (They cost between $195 and $260.) Users can set their ring to one of four different vibration patterns and five different colors when a phone call, email, message or app notification comes through. The idea is to cut through the information overload by selecting particular alerts. According to a study that Ringly recently conducted, users saw a 40% reduction in the volume of notifications.

The jewelry now integrates with over 80 apps, including shopping apps like Etsy, Ebay, or Poshmark. This means that an Ebay seller, for example, can set their Ringly to buzz every time a sale is made. If you want to reduce noise even further, you can set up a deep filter so that only calls or messages from certain people are notified. Parents might turn off all notifications except those from their children or babysitter, for instance.

Eventbrite, the ticketing and event management platform, is taking a crack at paperless future. The company announced a new option for people planning events through Eventbrite: RFID bracelets. In lieu of printing tickets, picking them up at will call, or scanning a little barcode on their smartphone screens, visitors can wear a bracelet containing a tiny RFID (radio frequency identification) chip. This technology is already in use at some music festivals and other large public events. But Eventbrite is hoping that this new feature, made possible by the company’s acquisition of a startup called Scintilla Technologies, makes the technology accessible to smaller and medium-sized events that may not have the budget for dedicated RFID terminals and many thousands of high-tech wrist bands. “We want to democratize it,” says Laurent Sellier, Eventbrite’s VP of product.

MasterCard is rolling out a “Pay By Selfie“ feature that allows retailers to verify an online shopper’s identity using a photo of their face. The new functionality will be available to stores and e-commerce services in the United States beginning in the middle of 2016, and in the rest of the world in 2017. A user takes an initial photo of themselves to establish their identity. When that customer makes subsequent purchases by credit card, they take a new photo of their face, which an algorithm then compares to the original to verify the identity. The service, called MasterCard Identity Check, offers retailers a range of verification services including more conventional ones like single-use passcodes sent to customers by SMS text message.

China’s ecommerce giant Alibaba unveiled Pay Watch, a payments-focused smartwatch that it plans to crowdfund on its online shopping website Taobao. This smartwatch is produced in partnership with FiiSmart, and “not developed by Alibaba Group”. Prices will range up to about $160 for the YunOS-powered device that supports mobile payments through Alibaba’s Alipay platform. The main way it’s expected to handle this is by generating on-demand QR codes that retailers can scan at checkout. Comparisons to the Apple Watch seem inevitable (though certainly not on price), but there’s also more than a little similarity to the ASUS ZenWatch.